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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to involve multi-sector stakeholders in catchment-based water systems planning.

Defra recently published its landmark Plan for Water, to deliver a safe, reliable, resilient supply of clean and plentiful water – for our homes, businesses, leisure and for the wildlife that relies on it. The Plan for Water is built around an integrated, catchment approach to managing the water system. In the Plan for Water, we committed to delivering catchment plans backed up with new funding to improve all water bodies in England. Defra is currently engaging with multi-sector stakeholders such as the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) to develop options and generate ideas on how catchment plans will work in best practice.

CaBA is a community-led approach that engages people and groups from across communities at a local level to help improve water environments (more information can be found here: Catchment Partnership Pages | Catchment Data Explorer). CaBA’s catchment partnerships include involvement from public, private and civil-society sector organisations, playing a key role in the development of local catchment community aspirations. They drive greater awareness of water environment issues and catchment-based solutions, empowering communities to engage. Results show that catchment-level interventions are effective in realising multiple benefits.

The Environment Agency is refreshing its National Framework for Water Resources and is aiming to set out how improvements can be made to collaborative multi-sector planning on a regional scale and how these plans can more effectively link to local and catchment based initiatives.