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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of Environment Agency regulation on farm reservoirs, and what steps her Department is taking to ensure that on-farm water storage can be developed (a) effectively and (b) safely to support food production.

The National Framework for Water Resources sets out the potential scale of action to secure sustainable levels of abstraction.

Many abstraction licences reservoirs are sustainable because they include conditions to protect the water environment. If not, the Environment Agency works collaboratively with abstractors to identify solutions, potentially removing the need for changes to abstraction licences, aiming to work with licence holders to allow adaptative measures to be implemented first where legally possible.

Reservoir safety regulation concerns ensuring reservoirs, their dams and embankments are safe. Government will consult on proposals to reform reservoir safety regulation, including tailoring requirements closer to the level of hazard.

Government supports farmers and growers with a Defra-funded programme of Local Resource Option studies to help them identify, screen and rank options to improve water supply resilience.