Farmers have made a pledge to be as involved as possible with government plans to improve their county's flooding defences.

The NFU have stated that it is vitally important local farmers are engaged with and involved the new Cumbria Flood Action Plan. After the devastating consequences of the flooding in late 2015 and early 2016 the government is now taking action to prevent such a tragedy hitting Cumbria again in the future.

During the first week of July the Environment Agency published three documents on Gov.uk to help communicate its plan which has five main themes strengthening defences, upstream management, maintenance, resilience and water level management boards.

NFU North West Regional Director David Hall has worked with Rural Payments Agency (RPA) to ensure adequate funding was made available for the recovery of farmland after the flooding. He has since been involved in the Cumbria Flood Partnership, ensuring that the voice of the Cumbrian farmers was heard from the very beginning, he said: “The NFU held a meeting with the newly appointed Catchment Directors to find out how we could ensure farmers were involved in the creation of the Cumbria Flood Action Plan.

"Following this we held a number of workshops for farmers across the three priority catchment areas to find out how they had been affected by the floods and what they felt needed to be done to reduce the impact of flooding in future.

"This report was then fed directly back into the Cumbria Flood Partnership. We will continue to ensure that farmers are involved and included as the plan develops during the implementation stages.”