Water: Environmental Impact Assessment

(asked on 26th November 2020) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent environmental assessments his Department has carried out on water quality in lakes and rivers throughout the UK.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 4th December 2020

This is a devolved matter and the information provided therefore relates to England only.

The Environment Agency recently published updated results for the ecological status and potential classification for all waters in England from source to sea on the Catchment Data Explorer. This is available at the link below. In addition, the Environment Agency carries out assessments for a range of purposes including for bathing waters, water resource planning, flood risk management, the status of salmon and other fisheries and monitoring known and emerging chemical risks. The assessments are to target and understand the effectiveness of programmes of measures and to inform regulatory and enforcement work and decisions on specific schemes or permits.

The Environment Agency reports on the state of the environment in a number of different ways, including releasing data and analysis to meet specific statutory requirements and producing State of Environment (SoE) reports to provide a balanced picture of environmental state in England that go beyond these specific statutory requirements. A Water Quality report (Feb 2018) and a Water Resources report (May 2018) were produced as part of a rolling programme of SoE reports. These are available at the link below.

http://environment.data.gov.uk/catchment-planning/

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/state-of-the-environment

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