In brief...
In one of her last duties as Defra Secretary of State, Liz Truss MP met with farmers in the Bury St Edmunds constituency of Jo Churchill MP to discuss their frustrations with rules for the grant funding scheme for farm reservoirs
The NFU was pleased to welcome onto a west Suffolk farm the then Defra Secretary of State Liz Truss MP, prior to her switch to the Justice Department in the subsequent Cabinet re-shuffle.
The meeting, which also included Environment Agency national and local officials, was arranged by Jo Churchill, MP for Bury St Edmunds, following representations made to her by the NFU on behalf of her farmer constituents.
A number of farmers have been refused grant funding to help with the significant costs of building reservoirs.
Rachel Carrington, NFU county adviser for Suffolk, said that both MPs took a close interest in the issue and expressed a strong desire to find a satisfactory solution.
Discussions focused on the host farmer’s application for grant funding to build a reservoir under the rural development programme’s Countryside Productivity Scheme. His application has been rejected because of a newly introduced rule that requires many (but not all) applicants to prove that their water resources scheme will result in a saving of water.
The NFU maintains that this ‘saving water’ rule is inappropriate for local conditions because it ignores the sustainable benefits of storage – taking water when it is plentiful and storing it for use at times of scarcity.
In cases where farmers want a new reservoir to increase irrigated area as well as make their access to water more secure, they must guarantee that the proposed scheme will result in less water being used for irrigation.
In UK conditions, reservoirs are installed to reduce water consumption; indeed, in our climate, a business case could rarely be made for building a reservoir only to save water.
Instead, local reservoirs are built to take peak flow water for use at times of scarcity. Environmental sustainability is achieved by taking the pressure off rivers during times of low summer flows, not by reducing annual volumes of abstraction.
The problem has arisen because of the relatively new EU ‘Article 46’, although it is unclear whether the problem lies with the rule itself, Defra’s interpretation of it, or a combination of both.
As a result of the meeting the NFU is hopeful that current problems can be resolved before the second round of the Countryside Productivity Scheme opens. Currently, there is no fixed date for the opening of Round Two.