Environment and Climate Change Committee

Wednesday 11th November 2026

(began 4 hours, 5 minutes ago)

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10:01
Baroness Sheehan Portrait Baroness Sheehan
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Good morning and welcome to the Lords Committee on the Environment and Climate Change. Today we will be hearing from the CEO of the Environment Agency, Philip Duffy, on two subjects, firstly on waste crime, which will be the third follow up session of the committee's waste crime inquiry. And the second part of the meeting will focus on drought. Essentially, to understand the situation, since the committee's report on drought was published in May this year. Before we start, may I remind everyone that the session will be webcast live on Parliament TV and that a transcript will be taken and made public.

 Members are reminded that they should declare any relevant interests the first time they speak. Now, I'll take the opportunity here to say that I am a director of Peers for the planet. And when we come to the Drought Report that I own a borehole on our home in South Oxfordshire. Today is a little unusual, colleagues. So before we start, may I let everyone know that at 11 a.m. we will stand to observe the two minute silence in remembrance of the armistice. The committee's clerk, Alastair, will give me the signal when it is almost time.

 So that's just a heads up. So we should start business. And the first of all, Philip Duffy. Philip, thank you very much for the letter that we received late. I think it was yesterday. We have been waiting for it for some time, but it's good that it arrived in time for this meeting. The first question that I'd like to put to you is, is to ask you to update the Committee on Operation Unite, and in particular, what were the challenges faced and the lessons learnt from this campaign? Please introduce the campaign to us.
10:03
None Portrait Speaker 1
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Thank you very much, chair, and and it's great to be back here talking to you about this important subject, Operation Unite. We I flagged this last in front of the committee as essentially an experiment to see whether we could improve the response across the organisation and with our law enforcement partners. And there are sort of three big things we were trying to achieve. The first one was being genuinely intelligence driven. So not just waiting until we're looking at a piece of rubbish in a field, but thinking ahead about where do we think criminals are infiltrating the waste system and taking a more proactive, targeted approach to where we put our enforcement activity?

 The second approach was to look at permits. It is, I think, to my mind and the minds of many who look at the Environment Agency peculiar that the agency issues permits to regulate all sorts of activity, but we very rarely revoke them or suspend them, which means that you can, in some cases, breach those permits year after year with no great consequence. And we want to change that. And so one of the central bits of work we did over the last 18 weeks was to visit 42 permitted sites, and we revoked or suspended 17 of the permits held at those sites.

 I think that's quite a strong signal to people in the waste sector that we don't regard compliance as optional. It also sends a signal to communities, many of whom are experiencing smell poor odour control. Dust flies from poorly maintained waste sites that the agency won't be tolerating that year after year. And that is exactly what I think people expect the agency to be doing in its regulatory work. And thirdly, we were really joining up with law enforcement partners, notably the police forces, the National Crime Agency and HMRC to provide a much more effective. Pressure on organised criminals and to give a sense of of the activity which took place over that 18 week period between April and October, there were 37 waste crime arrests.

 We also issued 13 restriction orders banning people access to land to to dump, and we concluded 71 waste related court cases in that period, of which 52 led to conviction. There were six not guilty findings. So that's a reasonable performance, I would say. We've also been trying to strengthen our work and was raised with me when I was last here on asset confiscation. Waste crime is a fundamentally an economic crime with waste and community consequences. And the question that we're grappling with is how best to deny those criminals access to the significant profits? The best way of all is to deny them access to the waste stream and take their permits away.

 But the second best way is to go after their criminal proceeds. So we launched six confiscation investigations as part of Operation Unite. £4.4 million of criminal money was identified in those exercises. We've also got nine live mail laundering investigations with partners coming out of Operation Unite.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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I think it's unbelievable. I think you've got to have a proportionate and staged approach when you're dealing with bits of infrastructure that are extremely important for the functioning of the economy. I think there is an important point to make about understanding that one breach, or several breaches that are minor, for example, driving routes or a failure in dust control would not normally lead to immediate enforcement. We have a whole range of enforcement activities. At the most basic end, it's guidance to an operator to do that, and then we step it up. Now, of course, to some degree, there is a judgment whether you think something is a C or a D, and we can talk about that judgment is right or wrong.

 And there may be people, you know, out there living near a band C functioning permitted waste site who would disagree with the notion that it should stay open because these sites can be difficult to live nearby. But on the other hand, we have to take a balanced view about making sure our regulation is proportionate and we are giving operators the chance to to recover the situation. What I think is not acceptable is that we allow an operator to stay in D, E and F, where we've got really quite severe concerns about non-compliance year after year.

 That has been the situation that that we've had previously, and that is clearly unacceptable. And our simple message here is, if you are in band D, F, yes, you'll get an opportunity to improve. If you don't improve, you'll be suspended. If you still don't improve, you will have your payment revoked.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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So let's just start with revocation. It depends on what permit we're revoking for what kind of activity, because we don't just have landfills. We also have material facilities that process materials, and we have waste handling stations that weigh material. So it will depend on the issue. If it is handling a situation, the business closes. There's not really much more follow up to that. The issue is obviously much more severe. If we were to revoke a permit on a landfill, and we have done that at Wally's Quarry in Stoke on Trent during my time at the Environment Agency, and that raises all sorts of quite complicated policy and social questions.

 Landfill operators are required to post with the Environment Agency a financial bond, and that bond is intended to cover the immediate. Make safe costs should, for some reason, the business stop operating either through an insolvency or through regulatory closure. And in general, we have found that level of resourcing does enable us to do things like secure the site with fencing, make sure the gas management systems are in place to remove gases that could become dangerous or could build up on the landfill site. We do, however, face really serious choices in some landfills about the balance between a peremptory closure on very sound regulatory or criminal grounds and the ongoing running of that landfill to make sure it is closed in good order.

 And if you've studied landfills, you'll know that it's important to make sure the shape of the waste is right and the facing of the waste is right. And we're very alive to that, that, that, that trade off we have to make. We obviously want the criminals and any non-compliance driven out, but we also need to make sure communities aren't left with a landfill that has been unresolved. There is an issue which we are discussing with the government. And, you know, they're taking a very close interest in the whole question of waste crime about whether this sort of regime is adequate for the future and provides sufficient financial guarantees to make sure, at the higher risk levels of landfill, we have enough resources to manage.

Should the site be closed unexpectedly for any reason.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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It's a great question, because the truth is that the the largest degree of harm from waste crime is not the visible dumping in fields or poorly managed permitted sites. It's actually tax evasion. People mis declaring, but treating the waste in a perfectly compliant manner. So the waste itself has gone to a landfill, or it's gone to a treatment centre precisely the way its permit should have done. But the paperwork around it has declared that it was inorganic waste, like construction material, when in reality it was organic material and it should have paid the higher rate of landfill tax.

That is the primary source of criminal arbitrage in this sector, not the sort of offences that the E is dealing with. And we have a lot of intelligence about that. And one of the things that we have been doing in Operation Unite is trying to integrate our intelligence together with our partners, particularly HMRC and the police, and thinking about how best to disrupt that sort of activity. You would not disrupt it by revoking the permit. Since the permit is actually in good order, you'd have to disrupt it in some other way. How might you do that?

 You're then looking at essentially law enforcement through forensic accountancy, through HMRC, disruption to flows of money. So the receipts of this tax evaded money is being properly dealt with and making sure that people who knowingly do business with this tax evading entity understand that they may be involved in crime, and we can do that by calling out those offences. We can do that by making sure that people who don't have good documentation face things like fixed penalty notices for driving waste to sites where they don't have the right paperwork.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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I start the point of the ten point plan is to attack the problem from every direction that we can. So probably the most impactful thing is the construction of better intelligence capability. And I have been very surprised by what we can achieve by bringing together not only criminal covert intelligence, but overt intelligence who is buying and selling land out there, who has got from the traffic commissioners an HGV licence? What address did they give for that? Who is applying for a new curry broker dealer permit? So we're trying to bring that together so that the sorts of targeted work which my colleague is discussing can be more effective.

 And we're spending quite a lot of money on that this year on the IT build to do that. And we've had really good cooperation from partners across, across government. I think the second thing that I think is important for this committee is, is transparency. You can sometimes feel like there's all sorts of ways of assessing waste sites, their severity, their social impact. We've taken an approach of publishing as much as we can so that committees like this can have a look at that data and see whether you agree with our judgments. You may or may not.

We will listen to your views on those things and updating that to make sure that communities can see themselves. What we're doing, I think, is really important for reassurance and public confidence. We've covered, I think, a lot about about your permit is at risk if you're engaged with criminality. It's a message I want to repeat here. I think behind the scenes, the joint working is really important. We have the joint unit on waste crime. We're getting very strong support from the National Crime Agency and from the Constabularies and also from HMRC. We've seen I won't go into details of cases, but we've seen in some of the case handling we've moved cases between different organisations.

 So tell you what, this is really an HMRC case. This is really an NCA case. We're not the right body or EA should take on this case so that all those disruptive tools we can use are there. I think it's too early at this point to say whether this is move the dial. We have anecdotes because we track a lot of the organised crime gangs that show they are feeling the pressure from UK law enforcement, and they are reconsidering their business choices. That is merely an anecdote at this stage. We have to look at the the overall surveys we're going to do, but I think we are feeling quite positive.

 We're going in the right direction. There's still a huge amount more to do, to be quite clear, but that has been a positive step forward.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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No. We've had some farcical scenes over the summer, so it might be sensible if I can just highlight for the committee some of the problems we have with the powers we need to get restriction orders, and we've been saying to our teams, get there in 48 hours. We want people on the ground quickly and when they find there is crime, they want to stop the site being accessed and that they have to have a restriction order. We've had a case where we just could not get caught. Time we kept going. It was adjourned. The landowner was unrepresented.

That was adjourned and there's no default. So we've gone for weeks and weeks and weeks. We know there's a problem. The community knows a problem. There's no restriction order in place. So we need a system that says we have a faster response. There's no point us being there in 48 hours. If there's nothing we can do, we just watch the offending go on. So there are a few things there. I think the government is well aware of that, and we're having very constructive conversations with them about, about, about what would be necessary to to turn that situation around.

 I've also been quite clear that some of the powers which I envy in the tax system about whether someone is fit and proper to hold a permit we would like in the environmental situation. It absolutely cannot be right that a person who we know through intelligence, is involved in, in offending, can apply for a waste permit, and the Environment Agency must grant it. That cannot be a justifiable situation to be in. So this issue of powers we're going to have to keep keep arguing for that.

And clearly it may require legislation in due course.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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So I think they have a role, but they are not the answer to the problem that Baroness she has just described, which is essentially very organised, large scale offending. However it is there is merit in making the lives of organised criminals just harder in general, adding more friction to their lives. And I see a real role for fixed penalty notices in making sure it's harder for them to hire a driver who's somewhere on the margin. They've been paid some cash to drive a load. They're not. They don't know about the overall plot. They don't know about the tax situation.

They don't know they're just helping. And actually, if we were clear that drivers should not drive loads without having proper documentation because they themselves would face a financial penalty, that could dissuade at the margin some of its operations. And so I think there is a role, and I think a lot of our field teams think that there's a merit to it, because they want to send a signal in real time to people who may be collaborating with the dodgy operators that they should not do so. So we are piloting it. We've done we've only done 64 since I last came from the committee, not very many.

 And we've piloted them for two broad areas people who are trans shipping waste, sending waste overseas without proper documentation, and people who are driving without a proper waste documentation at the minute that's not issued in the field. We we find the offence, then we take the address down, we authorize it and write to the person, and they have generally paid the fixed penalties. I think when you think about deterrence, we know that timeliness and certainty are massive factors in deterrence. So the bit of our officers to actually issue an FGM in the field and say, right, you're now owe me this money, I think would be really transformative.

That's our next stage of work. And that's what my field teams who work for the E really want to see happen. As you said, the Prime Minister has said he wants to increase the level from a few hundred pounds up to £5,000. We also need to look at how we enforce those penalties, because penalties that aren't enforced are a waste of everyone's time. It's currently only a criminal offence not to pay a penalty, which would require us to take criminal prosecution. That's not a brilliant way of running a system, so we have some operational concerns that we're discussing with the government about how you would operationalize a higher fine level.

But I think it's a niche role. But I do think it's quite a useful role for enforcement.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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I don't think that's right. I think we are very keen to use criminal law whenever we can just to. Let me just provide some statistics and also some some reality from what it's like currently trying to prosecute criminal cases. So over this period, April to October, the EA brought 71 criminal prosecutions in court. We got only two immediate custodial sentences and only eight suspended sentences from that. And the fine total was 118,000. So it's quite small fines compared to the scale of the offending. It can take us over a year from arrest to laying charges.

If the case is complex and involves lots and lots of evidence, some of which might have closed material procedures that can take time and court listings can be very slow at that time. It can take us years to get to a court listing, so you will have to be patient . On the court cases. There is, as you know, lack of will from the EA to bring these cases. We are, I think, quite forward leaning. I would say, though, that permanent revocation, going after assets, civil offenses, other forms of disruption, they can also apply pressure on committed criminals.

 And I think if you look, if you were talking to other people from UK law enforcement, they would be saying what I'm saying to you, which is you have to look at the complete range of disruptions, including travel bans, asset seizure proceeds of crime orders, the whole range of things to dissuade criminals who may not be particularly dissuaded by a relatively short custodial sentence.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Well.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Yes, there are many things we've covered . The whole issue of getting restriction orders faster and actually making the landowner make the case that they shouldn't have a restriction order, rather than us have to find court slots to do that. That I think would be very important. Secondly, I think we have a real problems in the permit system because the permit system is an environmental law, but it's crossing over with the tax evasion and criminality problem here. And we need to say you can't have a permit even if you did comply with the law, the environmental law, because you have criminal convictions, you are not a fit and proper person.

 Thirdly, we need to look at who really controls permits. So we've seen market manoeuvres where there was a legitimate permit with legitimate permit operator and the company or the asset was bought by someone else and the permit transfers with them. And we can't say, well, hang on, we don't want that permit run by you. We have no re permitting process. Fourthly, you can find an old permit that hasn't been revoked. You can reopen the site. In the meantime, the planning authority could have granted homes around the area. People may have changed. That feels like a real problem for communities around the country.

 I mentioned anti-corruption, we have a real problem, I think, in who is signing off these contracts, either in local government or in the supply chain. And are we confident that we have got enough controls to drive out corrupt practices from those areas? And transparency, I think, is a really important area. And then lastly, deterrence requires not only a response, it requires a certainty of conviction and a high enough penalty. And at the minute, I do not think the risk of losing money or going to prison or having a fine is high enough to deter people who are.

 You mentioned the criminal records. Many people we're working with here, they have very long criminal records. If having a criminal record was dissuasive, they would not be where they are now. So if you really want to dissuade them, you're gonna have to find something else that's gonna be more dissuasive. If that isn't going to be jail time, what's it going to be? It's probably going to have to be financial penalties or loss of assets.

 So there's quite a lot there in to end, I think we need to look at. And that may require legislation.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Fine. So the money, it's roughly four and a half in million the first year, and then it will be 20 and 20 in the subsequent two. That's the profile of the money. That's not unreasonable because you can't immediately hire people and spend money in year. A large chunk of it so far of the four and a half is going on, essentially improving the intelligence. So that is buying it kit that helps us take in data from other agencies and merge it so we can see patterns. So I mentioned before that we think that land registry data is really significant because we often see criminals trading land prior to a dumping event.

 We'd rather like to know before the dumping happened that it was likely so we could block the site before it got there. We've also spent money on basically plumbing the E into the other systems of the National Crime Agency, so we have more licences to access police intelligence. We can understand what the tax records are, and we can have embeds from those organisations who are working with us to join the dots up on those investigations. There's nothing more frustrating than discovering that you're dealing with an organised crime group, and another government agency you didn't know about was investigating the same group.

You want to make sure you have, you know, de-conflicted that and you're taking a sensible approach that has been really important. We're spending more money on field teams because we want to make sure we can consistently get this 48 hour response. That is.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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So far because.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Yes. Because we need we need to be tracking our progress in a way. And our current metrics don't really allow that. Because if you look at the waste sites disrupted metric, the more you look, the more you find. So that's not really helping us give you assurance. Secondly, next year we will do another survey with the ESA and others on, on waste crime, which is again, it's a it's a survey, but it is on a consistent basis. And that will perhaps give us a refresh on the 38 million and whether that's moving or not. And that will be in 2027.

So that will be an important, important metric. You raise awareness. I think this is such an important question because the criminal gangs here, they're not just sort of taking it disruption as well. They'll be thinking about what's next. Right. And I think we can already see worrying things. So for example, we are watching very carefully illegal waste exports where there are other ways you can exploit that by declaring what you're exporting and where we've seen the European Union put in quite tough controls on the export of plastics to non OECD countries. And and we could see diversion of their waste flows, including back into parts of the UK.

 So we need to make sure that we don't just declare victory in this area and allow the problem to move somewhere else. And you know, no doubt criminals are in meetings right now thinking of what their next move will be. And we can already see some opportunities those areas. So you have to provide a cross-system pressure on criminality or it will just pop up somewhere else, maybe less visibly, maybe less harm to our communities. But we should not, I think, lightly disregard the really, really serious global consequences of international waste.

Crime is really serious.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Okay. So the first thing to say is that we're a parliamentary body, so we exist to do things that the government and Parliament ask us to do. And we don't have a routine role in site clearance. That's not a role that's been given to the Environment Agency. We do have the ability to intervene. We've done three times and only three times where we see overriding imperative emergency reasons to clear up, and that was the case at Kidlington. It was also the case at a site called Twyford House in Stoke. So it's very unusual for us to lead on, on on clearance.

 However, the government have announced a pot of money and a process for looking at sites that they would wish to fund local government to clear. We're collaborating with them on those areas. They've also said they want to establish a framework contract for the UK as a whole, which would enable public authorities of all sorts to get sites cleared without going through a lengthy new procurement process. There's quite a lot of work going on on that and it's under that framework. That agreement was reached between the government, not the Environment Agency, but the government and the local authority in Wigan to clear the Bolton House road site in Bickershaw.

 More generally, we do have to be quite careful with this because sites vary in what they contain enormously. Some of them can be very small but contain extremely toxic material and that clearly needs to be resolved. Some of them can be very large, but they contain essentially contaminated soils and construction waste that is inert. And the ecological advice we would give is do not disturb things you don't need to disturb. If they're not causing leachate, they're not causing a smell. They don't contain toxic material. Now, obviously, we have to verify that and test all those sites.

 But one of the sites you mentioned has a lot of former construction waste, which we think is inert. We will check it and carry on studying those things. So you've got to look at where you're doing it. In the case of Kidlington, the site not only contained large amount of organic material, so it smelt bad, but of course it was going through putrefaction. So we had gas risks. And that can cause explosive effects. There are a whole range of things that we really want to prioritize. So the issue of clearance requires good evidence, requires balance.

 I totally understand why communities desperately want these sites resolved, particularly if they smell bad or cause them inconveniences. I think there are a slightly deeper set of policy questions about what we do with the land afterwards and how we manage those areas, which we are discussing with Defra. So I think it's a very live conversation for government, probably one they are best placed to answer rather than the Environment Agency. But I don't know if you want to come on the two sites that the law has mentioned.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Further abstraction when water levels are high. And we have recently been doing that, particularly in Devon. Following recent rain, we have been working very closely with South West Water to maximize abstraction from the river exe. We can also in places and bearing in mind the impact on the natural environment, reduce what's called a. compensatory flow, which is a proportion of the reservoir's water flow that goes back into a river. And by cutting that, we can accelerate the recharge of those assets. We have quite a program. We are doing it using our discretion. So it's mainly under local enforcement positions.

But some of that will be regularized through drought orders in the course of the winter. That will enable water companies to abstract more water than normal and also put less water back into natural environment. All of that is good, except that I don't think we can be. remotely complacent because, of course, reservoir service large parts of the country. But elsewhere in the country, we are quite reliant on groundwater for our public water supply, particularly those areas that are rely upon artesian systems. So in those areas, we're going to have to think much harder about making sure we have resilience across different areas.

 People are using water wisely and we are maintaining restrictions on water use throughout the winter. A difficult message to give when it is raining, but an important message we have to give nevertheless. And we're also pushing the companies extremely hard on leakage, which actually, if you look at our most recent review, went up last year, largely caused by the very dry soils causing movement in their systems. So a huge amount to do right now.

 You win or lose a drought in the winter, not the summer. And now is an .
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Realistic to expect in the next couple of years to be added to the stock? I don't have a number for you, but I can tell you, and you have to ask the government about the 15 million. But what I can say is that E needs to change how it thinks about the problem. So we have what's called a hands off policy in abstraction. If a water level goes below a certain level, if you're a farmer, you can't take any water, but there is no hands on level. So if a water causes above a certain level, you don't get to take as much water as you can.

 And we have seen instances where we've had NFU come to us and say, we're in flood in this part of the country, can we take more water? And the EA said, well, it's not with your permit, so we need better telemetry of our rivers and we need changes in how we do the abstraction, permitting to say above a certain level, when the river is in spate, that's fine. Exactly what we've just done with the south west water on the exe. We also need to look at things like how long abstraction licences last. If you're raising private money as a farmer, you may have a mortgage against the work you're doing on your farm.

You need the abstraction permit to have the same duration. And we need to look at the and this is something we have raised with Mhclg ministers. I think they are listening quite carefully. Permitted development rights, and one of the things I haven't appreciated is that on farm reservoirs are only permitted if the use of that water is on your own farm. So if you had a neighbouring farm, I couldn't build one and then give you water. That would be not. I'd have to get planning consent for that. So this is a sort of grit in the system , which is discouraging farmers from doing that.

 What did we see, particularly in the east of England over last summer, nearly. 1400 farmers who had surface water abstraction rights, mainly in arable, mainly on the in the east of England, the Wensum would be a case in point losing their access to water that has big food security and economic consequences. So I .
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Huge demand for on farm. reservoirs now. Okay, I feel I need to say something about this issue about water going to see if I can, because there is a counter important argument. So we we are balancing some pretty extreme measures to, to tilt the system towards public water supply at the current time. And that is cutting the available water for, for nature. There was a period where the River exe this summer was running at its. 99th percentile of low flow, and that does have consequences for fish. populations for Atlantic salmon. For now, we may or may not prioritise that, but I need to recall that we have a legal obligation to consider those factors in this trade off.

We do consider them very seriously, but we are tilting that abstraction in favour of public water supply. There are limits on how fast you can pump. You have to have the right pumping equipment. You have to have the right set up for it, the depth and it can be difficult to pump when a river is in full spate because of the volume and the speed of the water. But we are doing our best to make sure that we do have heavy rain. We're making. We're not we're not missing a day of heavy rain on. On the question of EPR, I totally agree.

 We have some abstraction permits date from law from the. 1960s and are on paper. I mean, what we need to. operationalise the hands on within constraints, hands off system that I have just discussed with Lord Redwood, you would need to have the right technology and a more dynamic permit. That was clear. You could change those those things really rapidly. We also have really strange things in our abstraction permits. We have. dates based on historic farming practice of when you could start or stop abstraction. So often they say you can start on the 1st of November.

 Well, that's fine. If you were looking at the rainfall pattern when the permit was issued, but it may not be fine for the current conditions. So this is an inflexible system. It's not automated. It needs to go into EPR to be fixed. I think ministers have heard that from us loud and clear.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Requirements of nature versus the requirements of the public water supply? Yes. I mean, in some of our catchments every day, we have to make that trade off between our legal obligations towards nature, which require a certain level of flow to support things like migratory fish. You know, there are laws are passed that require us to think about that in in that situation, our obligation to meet public water supply, what farmers are allowed to have and what industry needs. And we have to balance all those different factors in, in, in our work every day, I think.

 What we saw this summer. Particularly in places like Norfolk, was such low flows in the rivers. We did, in fact, tell farmers they could not take any more water. They had their hands off restrictions, so they have an abstraction licence, but below a certain level of water. They can't do that. They can't do that because the judgment we have made is that you would be causing irreversible damage to the natural environment. If you had allowed that river to run dry, you obviously could allow it to run dry. You could make a different judgment. That's what the law says currently.

 But we have to make that judgment all the time. We completely understand why we need to preserve water supply for farmers. We think it's very odd that you can have a position in which, if you're accessing water from the public water supply, you can still access water. But if you're a farmer who's got either a private borehole or a surface water abstraction licence, you get your water supply turned off in the same season. That doesn't feel to us to be particularly justifiable. It is logical because they come from different sources. You know, the public from reservoirs.

 This is directly from the natural environment. But we need to make sure we see it as a system. And in particular, I mentioned fairness and the fairness of how we do that. I think some some farmers felt this was unfair. And, and I can see why they felt that. So that's an area we're going to look at very carefully for next summer, because we know, again,
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Being done across and between departments to kind of help. We're working very closely with colleagues in the Met Office on the outlook. I'm somewhat hesitant to sort of ventriloquize what they would say, but essentially they are worried about a period of very intensive rainfall, possibly pre-Christmas, and then a dry, cold end to the winter. And so it is perfectly possible that we could have flood quite severe flooding in the same parts of the country as we have severe drought. At the same time. That's a difficult message to communicate to the public, but it is what the science says, and it is perfectly possible we could be in that situation.

 You could have severe drought in Wessex and Devon and be pumping on the Somerset levels in the same month, and from that, what do we learn? Well, firstly, greater resilience of the system requires us to absorb and store more water. We've covered on farm reservoirs. We've also covered dynamic. abstraction refill strategies and inter regional networks. It also requires us to make sure that the Environment Agency and first responders are match fit for that. So we are currently completing surveys of all our critical flood assets to make sure they are in working order. We're looking at our rosters over Christmas to make sure we have enough people to deal with multiple crises at once.

 As chief executive, I am worried about the agency's. capacity to manage multiple events at once. I could add to that. wildfire because obviously in wildfire, our role is to make sure we have enough water to put fires out and how we do that. So we have quite a busy peak heat season over the summer as well in the agency. So you are right that this climate whiplash is a phrase I hear used quite a lot is is .
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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For .
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This debate has concluded
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