Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will provide a definition of sustainable abstraction in respect of removing water from chalk steam (a) aquifers and (b) rivers; and what criterion his Department takes into account in protecting such water environments from environmental damage.
Restoring England’s internationally important chalk streams is a Government priority.
The Environment Agency (EA) regulates abstraction from chalk streams and aquifers in the same way as from any other source. It set out its approach in a recent policy paper, Managing Water Abstraction.
An abstraction licence is unsustainable if:
For rivers, the EA uses the Environmental Flow Indicator as the default flow required to support Good Ecological Status in water bodies and to prevent deterioration. For existing abstraction, local ecological evidence is used to show whether an abstraction is causing environmental damage.
For groundwater, the EA uses 4 tests to assess groundwater bodies:
The EA is developing long term plans to reduce our reliance on chalk streams. The publication of the CaBA Chalk Stream Restoration Strategy later this year will set out recommendations on how to restore and protect England’s chalk streams. The EA is committed to working with all chalk stream stakeholders to better understand what more it can do in both the short and long term to make a difference on the ground.