Surface Water Flood Risk Extents for Planning in the UK

Environment Agency's Flood Map for Planning includes Surface Water Spatial Planning Extents. These datasets show land at risk from surface water flooding for three annual exceedance probability scenarios: 0.1%, 1%, and 3.3%. The data is designed for area-level risk indication, not individual property assessment.

Use Cases

• Assess land suitability for new construction based on surface water flood risk extents.
• Model regional flood hazard scenarios for emergency preparedness planning.
• Inform spatial planning policies using defined annual exceedance probability layers.
• Compare flood risk across different probability scenarios (0.1%, 1%, 3.3% AEP).

Strengths

• Data is provided for three specific annual exceedance probability scenarios (0.1%, 1%, 3.3% AEP).
• Produced by the authoritative Environment Agency for the UK.
• Includes attribution to differentiate between the 0.1% and 1% AEP scenarios within a single layer.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• The dataset is explicitly not suitable for assessing risk to individual properties.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

Environment Agency

Time Range

Present Day

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-19 13:41:35.291130; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom