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 increase investment in (a) the UK’s medium-term weather and (b) real-time water availability forecasting capability for farming to support drought planning.

BEIS is the lead department on matters regarding weather and the Met Office.

The Met Office weather predictions feed into the UK Hydrological Outlook which describes likely river flows and groundwater levels over the coming season and is used to support flood and drought risk assessments and adaptation planning. The Met Office also supports the National Drought Group, of which the National Farmers Union (NFU) is a partner, by providing briefing on the latest seasonal outlook.

The Environment Agency (EA) is developing a digital water resources licensing service. A pilot to make river information available in near real time was successfully undertaken this year in priority catchments. Current plans are to implement this across the country ahead of summer 2019 to enable more abstractors to manage their water abstraction during periods of prolonged dry weather. This is an enhancement to current support to abstractors, for example provision of advice and daily river flow data by phone or email.