Recommendation 19

When the six-year £5.2 billion capital programme to build new flood defence assets was launched in 2020, the government committed to provide better protection for 336,000 properties by 2027 by investing £5.2 billion in new flood defence projects.35 The programme got off to a slow start and the Agency did not spend £310 million of its funding in the first two years of the programme. Reasons for the slow start include inflation, capacity and Covid, as well as completing projects from the previous programme.36 The Agency initially planned to invest in 2,000 projects but this slow start means it has had to remove 500 of these from the current investment period.37