MADAM, I am writing in response to the letter which appeared in the Ross

Gazette on Wednesday, March 4th about the Bellwin grants to help pay with the cost of dealing with the county's flooding.Readers may be interested to know that following the flooding in 2007 a programme of flood repair work was undertaken by the council, with their partners Amey, which totalled approximately £2m and this money was claimed back from Central Government

and received early in 2008. Similarly following the September 2008 floods a programme of Bellwin works was completed within two months which totalled £571,698.80. As before we followed the process and a claim was submitted by the deadline in December 2008 and the money was received in late January 2009. We have now had confirmation that floods which we will do before the

deadline of March 20th, 2009. The current estimated value of this work is

£700,000 but this is not a final figure. We should then receive that money

within a couple of weeks. Again this is to cover the programme of flood repair work completed following those floods up to the end of January 2009.

Normally we have to complete any Bellwin flood repair work in two months but we got a little extra time this time to do this flood repair work to

take account of the Christmas period and indeed the demands on staff associated with the winter maintenance programme. It is worth noting that the Bellwin process is such that the local authority has to do and pay for the works and then we claim back and the process is that we can claim 85 per cent of the cost taking into account the council's annual threshol