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Environment secretary Steve Reed is spending an extra £200mn on England’s flood defences as he tries to shore up old and crumbling infrastructure after catastrophic flooding across parts of the country this winter.
The funding, to be announced formally on Wednesday, takes the total the government has committed to flood defences for the two years to March 2026 to £2.65bn in order to protect 66,500 properties.
“The previous government severely underfunded flooding and flood defences. By doing that, they put lives and livelihoods at risk,” Reed told the Financial Times. “It was a dereliction of duty to leave our flood defences in the worst condition ever recorded.”
The extra £200mn will be repurposed from underspent environment department budgets, according to an official, ahead of a tight government-wide spending review due in the summer.
Major flooding incidents were declared across the Midlands last month, covering over 1,000 kilometres of land and impacting thousands of buildings.
Floods also hit parts of southern England in the autumn after unseasonable rainfall, with 10 counties, including Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire, experiencing their wettest September on record, according to the Met Office, the national weather service.
The last Conservative government spent an average £1.05bn on flood defences per year between 2021 and 2023, according to data from the environment department.
“We’re increased spending on flood defences — both new projects and maintenance — by over a quarter and that’s despite an incredibly difficult financial inheritance,” Reed said in an interview.
The increased investment comes as the government has instructed the Environment Agency, the regulator, to prioritise maintenance of existing flood defences, several of which have failed in recent years, rather than focusing on fresh projects in new areas of risk.
The funding follows intense wrangling last year over the money allocated to flood defences in the Labour government’s first Budget in October.
Senior officials in the environment department were concerned that not enough had been set aside to protect British properties from extreme weather, according to people briefed on the discussions.
The Budget statement in October admitted that there were lingering “significant funding pressures” on flood defences, adding: “It is necessary to review these plans from 2025-26 to ensure they are affordable.”
Reed said “there are all sorts of conversations that go on ahead of a spending review”, but that after the October fiscal event he continued to do budget planning with the Treasury.
Roughly £110mn from the pot announced on Wednesday will be used to make urgent repairs to defences damaged in extreme flooding in recent months.
In a report late last year, the Environment Agency estimated that one in four properties in England would be at risk from flooding by middle of this century, after it updated its modelling techniques to factor in the effects of climate change.
Flooding from rivers, the sea or surface water already puts 6.3mn properties in danger and higher global temperatures are set to push that figure to 8mn by 2050, based on the agency’s latest assessment.
Ministers are meanwhile gearing up for a spending review in June that they expect to be even more bruising than the one-year “holding” review that accompanied the Autumn Budget.
Rachel Reeves front-loaded public spending in her maiden fiscal event, notably with a £26bn two-year cash injection into the NHS. But from 2026-27 the overall spending envelope will increase by just 1.3 per cent in real terms a year.
Reed is still facing intense pressure from farmers following the chancellor’s decision to raise inheritance tax on agricultural land.
His department is also braced for the potential collapse of Thames Water, Britain’s biggest water company, if it fails to secure approval for up to £3bn in fresh loans in a current High Court hearing.
“All I can say is that we are keeping a watching brief on what is going on with Thames,” Reed said. “The business remains stable. Whatever happens, there is no threat to the water supply, and we are ready for any eventuality.”
Some institutional investors have expressed caution about putting money into the water industry given industry regulator Ofwat’s refusal to allow companies to put up household bills as much as they wanted.
But Reed said he had attended a breakfast on Monday with 160 international investors focused on the water industry.
“They seemed pretty keen to me on the water sector,” he said. “There was a bit of argy-bargy over what the . . . final (Ofwat) determination might be but they put that out in December and we now have an investable sector.”
