§ Mr. Peter AinsworthTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what the annual grant to the Environment Agency for flood defence work has been in each of the last four years in(a) current and (b) real terms; what the projected figures for the remainder of the planning period are; and if she will make a statement. [10605]
§ Margaret Beckett[holding answer 26 October 2001]: My Department provides funding to the Environment Agency, local authorities and internal drainage boards for capital works that meet essential criteria and has also in 64W recent years made funds available to the agency for other initiatives, for example to assist with flood risk public awareness and recently to assist in meeting the extra costs for emergency response and repair associated with last year's floods, and special funding for the design and feasibility costs of river defences.
Allocations to individual authorities, such as the agency, within the total provision depends on the plans identified by those authorities and assessment against the Department's priority score arrangements. Actual outturn reflects the authorities' ability to deliver those plans. Allocations are decided in advance of the start of each financial year and I have just announced those for 2002–03. Therefore separate figures for the Environment Agency are not available for 2003–04 but otherwise the figures requested are:
Environment agency £ million Current prices Real prices1 Grants on capital works Contributions on other initiatives Total Total Actual outturn: 1997–983 43.0 0.0 43.0 43.0 1998–99 33.5 0.3 33.8 32.7 1999–2000 31.8 1.2 33.0 31.4 2000–01 26.4 15.5 41.9 38.7 Current allocation: 2001–02 44.0 19.1 63.1 256.9 2002–03 61.0 4.0 65.0 257.2 1 Using Retail Prices Index with the base year set to 1997 2 Expected future RPI increasing at 2.5 per cent. per annum 3 Allocation for this year was increased significantly in year by the redistribution of funds from elsewhere in the Department