Labour leader says he will urge ministers to boost funding for Environment Agency on visit to York in the wake of Storm Frank

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has called for greater flood defence spending after experts criticised the chancellor, George Osborne, for prioritising cutting the deficit.

Speaking in the flood-hit city of York, Corbyn praised emergency workers for helping those who found their homes and businesses inundated over the Christmas and new year period.

“[We are going to put] pressure on the government to fully fund the Environment Agency, not cut its budget, [to] fully fund new flood defences where they are necessary, not just in York but in other cities as well,” he told reporters.

Storm Frank: Body of kayaker found as Scotland bears the brunt of torrential rains - live Read more

Corbyn praised the emergency services for their coordinated response. “But they do need public support, they do need public investment. So, cutting flood defence money, which has been cut over the past five years, is not the answer, the answer has to be to increase it,” he said.

Osborne faced criticism on Wednesday from academics who said their analysis showed that flood defence spending had fallen.

Prof Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University said the government had shown no signs of taking into account the growing threat of extreme weather.



“What you would really expect is to see spending at a much higher level. 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,” he said.

Official data showed flood defence spending was cut significantly at the start of the last parliament, from £360m in 2010-11 to less than £270m in 2012-13. The prime minister, David Cameron, has pledged to spend £400m a year on flood defences over the next six years and there was a one-off spending boost following the Somerset Levels floods.

But the National Audit Office warned in November 2014 that excluding this, funding had fallen by 10% in real terms since 2010-11.

Overnight, it emerged that the Labour leader would demand to know why the Environment Agency had not deployed 10 high-volume water pumps his party said had remained idle throughout Storm Frank.



Corbyn said on Thursday: “A lot of very, very hardworking engineers who work at the Environment Agency have made superhuman efforts to try to protect this city as, indeed, they have tried to protect other cities all around the country. I think we should be grateful to them for that.



The Guardian view on UK national priorities: flood defence and overseas aid are not alternatives | Editorial Read more

“The problem is that the system has been overwhelmed by the level of rainfall and the river flow and we now have to look very seriously at improving flood defences, at improving river basin management and making even more resilient pumping systems.”

He also faced questions about why he had waited until New Year’s Eve to visit the areas of the country affected by flooding. “I don’t want to get in the way of people doing an emergency job at a highly critical time and I think that, to turn up in the midst of all of that and distracting engineers from what they were doing ... would not have been helpful,” he told reporters.

“I decided to come today to support Rachael Maskell, our local MP, who has done a fantastic job. I am here to learn from her, to learn from the Environment Agency, the local authority, the police and army, so that we can deal with these issues for the future, as well as the immediate.”