Tories promised £400m a year investment on flood defences but data shows spending was cut sharply at start of last parliament

George Osborne has been accused of jeopardising Britain’s crumbling flood defences over the past five years by prioritising cuts to the deficit, and has also been warned that infrastructure spending may need to rise sharply to adapt to climate change.

The warnings from leading academics came as parts of the UK were hit by Storm Frank on Wednesday, with hundreds of homes evacuated and thousands of people left without power.

Professor Simon Wren-Lewis, of Oxford University, who has analysed data on recent flood spending, said there was little sign that the government had changed course to take into account the growing threat of extreme weather.

“What you would really expect is to see spending at a much higher level,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like the same kind of reaction which we know has happened to the threat of terrorism, where we know spending levels have increased by a large magnitude.”

David Cameron has promised to invest £400m a year on shoring up flood defences over the next six years; but official data shows spending was cut sharply at the start of the last parliament, from £360m in 2010-11, to less than £270m in 2012-13.

The National Audit Office warned in November 2014 that, excluding a one-off spending boost of £270m in the wake of the Somerset Levels floods of winter 2013-14, total funding for flood protection had declined by 10% in real terms since 2010-11, and “sustaining the current standard of flood protection is challenging in this context, especially as climate change increases the load on flood defences”.

Wren-Lewis’s warning that current spending plans fail to take account of dramatic changes in our understanding of how climate change will affect the UK was echoed by Professor Ian Bateman, of the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences, who said: “What has been really important in the last decade or so, and what is particularly scary for Britain, is that extreme events are no longer extreme. Events that were one in 100 years are now expected more like one in 10 years.”

Wren-Lewis, who sits on the shadow chancellor’s panel of economic advisers, suggested that the government had thoughtlessly applied across-the-board cuts. “You just cut everything by a fixed amount because you haven’t the time or the inclination to think about it.”

A Treasury spokesman said: “We are not cutting investment in flood defences. Spending over the last parliament was higher than in the 2005-2010 parliament and will be higher still in this parliament.”

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn will challenge the Environment Agency’s response to the UK’s worst flooding in decades when he visits York on Thursday.



The Labour leader, who is scheduled to meet the EA’s emergency response team in the city, will raise questions over why it has not deployed state-of-the art pumps, which were tested in September this year.

The EA bought 10 high-volume pumps, capable of pumping one cubic metre per second, in September. The pumps, which are stored at a depot in Bridgwater, Somerset, were successfully tested in September 2015, according to agency documents.

Corbyn said: “Tomorrow I am meeting officials from the Environment Agency emergency response team in York. I will raise with them why they have failed to deploy these brand new pumps that look as if they could have helped significantly in alleviating some of the worst impacts of the floods in the north of England.”

An Environment Agency spokesman said that 30 additional pumps had been sent by articulated lorry to the affected area, but that the remaining new pumps remained stationed in different parts of the country.

“We are a national agency and we don’t use all of our equipment at the same time,” he said, adding that both the army and the fire brigade had also provided pumps.

The government’s £2.3bn of planned capital spending on flood defences over the next six years compares to £15bn on roads over the same period – and almost £16bn on high-speed rail.

The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, mocked Osborne’s promises to “fix the roof while the sun is shining”.

“The under-investment in flood defences is another and sadly more obvious example of this government’s short-term approach to infrastructure spending where it literally has not fixed the walls and embankments while the sun was shining,” he said.

Visiting flood-hit areas earlier in the week, the prime minister promised to “look at what’s happened here and see what needs to be done”.

Leeds city council leader Judith Blake has talked of a North-South divide in flood spending. But Guardian analysis of Environment Agency data reveals that capital spending was cut sharply in all regions in the early years of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.