About BeFloodReady

BeFloodReady provides guidance and information on Property Flood Resilience (PFR), helping homes, businesses and communities to BeFloodReady

Historically, flooding has had a significant impact on homes, businesses and communities across the UK. As climate change leads to more intense storms and sea level rise, these risks are continuing to grow. Increasing flood resilience at each individual property at risk is crucial to reduce the impact of flooding.

BeFloodReady is your local source of information and guidance on flood risk management, Property Flood Resilience (PFR) and how you can BeFloodReady.

How flood risk management
is evolving

In many places at flood risk across the UK, large, engineered flood defence schemes are the main way that flood risk to properties and businesses is managed and reduced. However, for a variety of reasons, this type of flood risk management scheme is not always the most suitable option for every situation. Sometimes these schemes aren’t technical suitable, or they are found not to be cost effective. This often leaves communities reliant on largely ineffective sandbags.

There are now other innovative and cost-effective products that can be used to manage flood risk at each individual property. This is called Property Flood Resilience, or PFR for short. PFR provides the opportunity for homes, businesses and communities to adapt, prepare and respond to this increasing flood risk

Find out more about PFR

The Flood
Protection Hierarchy

The flood resilience hierarchy shows how PFR bridges the gap between traditional flood defence schemes and ineffective sandbags.

Permanent engineered structures, such as walls, embankments and barriers, can be constructed to manage flood risk. This type of scheme can protect a large number of homes and businesses but can be costly.

Temporary barriers can be deployed along watercourses by the Environment Agency during flood events.

Includes measures such as door barriers, that can be fitted to individual buildings to reduce the risk of internal flooding.

Sandbags are used widely in communities at flood risk. However, these are an ineffective form of flood protection. Sandbags do not create a watertight seal across doors and come with a range of other issues that make them unsuitable for managing flood risk.

No management of flood risk.

Supporting communities at flood risk

The Flood Resilience Pathfinders, funded by Defra, has been set up to increase awareness of Property Flood Resilience (PFR) across the UK. The Pathfinders aim to support communities at flood risk by providing information and guidance, enhancing the future uptake of PFR as a key part of flood risk management.

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