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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if her Department will work with the Environment Agency to develop a service level agreement with water abstraction licence holders on time for adaption when licences are changed.

In April we published our Plan for Water, which sets out the importance of ensuring a clean and plentiful water supply, including environmentally sustainable water abstraction. I expect the Environment Agency to take what action is needed to reduce the environmental damage caused by abstraction – this will include changing abstraction licences.

The Environment Agency has indicated that it will consider giving abstractors time to adapt to licence changes on a case-by-case basis. Management options could include, for example, building a storage reservoir to replace a summer spray irrigation licence to abstract from a river. The Environment Agency is currently developing its approach, but current thinking is that it will be up to abstractors to justify why they need time to adapt. There will not be any fixed adaptation time but instead the period of time will be consistent with the environmental risks, the proposed adaptation and how much notice an abstractor has already had of the changes. Where an abstraction is already damaging the environment then it may not be possible for the Environment Agency to allow any time to adapt, especially where an abstraction is damaging a designated site or species. The Government also supports the agricultural sector with its Farming Transformation Fund grants for the construction of new on-farm reservoirs. We are also supporting the creation of national and regional Water Resource Management Plans for agriculture, which will help farmers plan their water resources and ensure better resilience to drought.