Recommendation 3

For most extreme weather risks government has not set out what level of resilience it wants to achieve or how it will attain this, including targets and standards for the desired level of national, local or sectoral resilience. For three of the four extreme weather risks examined by the National Audit Office (high temperatures and heatwaves, storms and surface water flooding), government has not specified what outcome it is looking to achieve, such as target levels of preparedness or resilience, or the amount of risk that it is willing to accept in the pursuit of those outcomes (risk appetite). For droughts, water companies are currently required to plan to ensure resilience to a 1-in-200 year ‘severe’ drought and from 2024, to a 1-in- 500 year ‘extreme’ drought. Without defining the level of risk government is willing to accept and aiming to attain, it cannot make informed decisions about trade- offs between long- and short-term priorities, investment or funding allocation in priority areas. It also makes it difficult for government or other stakeholders to track progress and evaluate how effectively and efficiently government is using public funds to improve national resilience. Recommendation 3: Using extreme weather risks as a pilot with a view to then applying more widely to other sets of national risks, the Cabinet Office should set out what a resilient UK looks like for these risks and a strategy to deliver this. This could include identifying the gap between the tolerable and acceptable level of risk and the current position, producing costed plans to drive down the risk to this level, bringing this information together to develop a coordinated and prioritised approach to investment, and monitoring and tracking progress in driving down the risk to this level.