Environment Agency: Finance

(asked on 24th January 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he has plans to secure funding to help enable the Environment Agency to investigate low impact category 3 and 4 pollution incidents.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 1st February 2022

Defra and its agencies received an additional £4.3 billion in the latest Spending Review in October 2021.

The Environment Agency (EA) receives over 100,000 incident reports a year, every one of which is recorded and assessed. The Environment Agency then focuses its efforts and resources on where they will have the most impact - so those which pose the greatest risk to the environment.

The Environment Agency's Incident Triage Project is looking at how the EA can best use its resources and maximise benefits for the environment. While it continues to attend the most serious incidents, the EA will concentrate its efforts on regulatory activities which prevent incidents from happening in the first place. Intelligence from incident reporting helps the Environment Agency plan and prioritise work to protect the environment.

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