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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent discussions she has had with the Environment Agency on helping to ensure that the process for abstraction licences is adaptable and flexible.

The Environment Agency has recently invested in significant additional resources to help improve the determination timescales associated with abstraction licence applications and to reduce the number of applications in the queue. Improvements are already being seen. The Environment Agency is also prioritising licence applications and Habitats Risk Assessments which are associated with Rural Payments Agency grants for farm storage reservoirs and has appointed a specialist to help support these applications through the process.

The Environment Agency and Defra are working closely with the sector to help farmers refill storage reservoirs and recover from the 2022 drought, and to improve the sector’s resilience to future drought. This includes improvements to water resources planning, investment in infrastructure, greater collaboration across all sectors of use, and more rapid communications to improve access to water when it is available.