Government response

Myths busted: flood budgets

We expect to spend at least £2.1billion on flooding and coastal erosion over the next four years.

This was published under the 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government

The Myth - The Mail on Sunday reported that the flood budget will be cut by more than £700 million over the next four years. A letter in Today’s Independent also repeated claims the budget is to be cut by 25% based on what the previous government had planned.

The Truth - The previous plans hadn’t been given the green light by the Treasury. No money had been committed to fund the plans, which means they couldn’t have gone ahead anyway - so to claim the new plans represent a 25% cut is nonsense.

We expect to spend at least £2.1 billion on flooding and coastal erosion over the next four years, only a slight decrease on the £2.36 billion spent over the last four years, and nowhere near the £700 million quoted. We’ve protected the budget as much as possible, meaning 145,000 homes will be better protected from flooding by 2015.

Further information

Published 8 November 2010