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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 20 November 2024 to Question 13929 on Water Abstraction: Licensing, what the regional breakdown of these water abstraction licences was in each of the last 10 financial years.

The number of water abstraction licences (temporary, full and transfer) live for all or part of the financial year for each of the last ten financial years is shown in the tables below. This data is shown by former Environment Agency (EA) regions.

This had been done by former EA regions to ensure consistency and allow comparison, as the EA changed its area boundaries in 2016.

For the purposes of this analysis, the boundary of each former EA region is river catchment based.

Also, these figures are for the country of England only. Figures for the former ‘Wales’ and ‘Midlands’ EA regions only include water abstraction licences with abstraction points located in England.