Details are still ‘work in progress’ and subject to change, but we might just hear a formal announcement before the end of the year (December 2017).
Government’s ambition is that abstraction reform should:
- Deliver sustainable catchments
- Develop users’ access to water
- Improve the EA's service to licence holders
Sustainable catchments
The aim is for greater focus at the catchment scale. In practice, this is likely to mean a new emphasis for Environment Agency of working with partners in different catchments to extend the current Catchment-Based Approach: CaBA into water resource management.
Defra and the EA are still developing their ideas about how abstraction reform plans can best be delivered in pilot catchments, and how plans could be part of the ‘sustainable catchments’ programme.
It looks likely that catchment partnerships (CPs) will be asked to play a central role in helping to find local solutions to water availability issues, with locally agreed solutions recorded in catchment-based abstraction licensing strategies (CAMS).
The NFU will seek assurances about adequate representation from (farmer) abstractors on catchment partnerships and we will be testing the catchment plan approach to establish whether it really can deliver more water for food production.
The catchment plan approach could hand a potentially important role to abstractor groups in helping to find ways to store and share water; and new groups may need to be formed in some catchments.
Improving user access to water
Defra and EA want to test the innovative elements of AR – primarily licence trading – in pilot catchments.
Taking part in trading platforms in the pilot catchments will be voluntary, and the focus will be on understanding what works well and what works less well.
Modern and simple licensing
Looking further ahead, new licensing activity will include two elements:
- Digital transformation
- Environmental permitting
The EA wants to move from paper to web-based licensing information which it sees as the cornerstone of its modernisation of water resources regulation. Defra and the EA also want to bring abstraction licensing into the Environmental Permitting Regulations (EPR) alongside water quality, discharge consents, etc.
It’s too early to get excited about the ideas starting to emerge about the plan for abstraction reform.
But the NFU firmly believes in the principle of finding ‘local solutions to local problems’ and so the focus on water catchment planning will, when formally unveiled, definitely be worth dipping into.