Standard content for Members only
To continue reading this article, please login to your Utility Week account, Start 14 day trial or Become a member.
If your organisation already has a corporate membership and you haven’t activated it simply follow the register link below. Check here.
The government is consulting on an overhaul of abstraction licensing as well as proposals to enhance groundwater protections.
Under the plans, the Environment Agency (EA) would be enabled to take a risk-based approach to regulating groundwater activities, while abstraction and impound licensing would be moved into the Environmental Permitting Regulations (EPR) in 2023. The move would replace the current system, established in the 1960s, which uses paper licenses.
According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) these changes would allow the EA to be more responsive to the changing environment in its management of water resources.
The EA would have more permitting options for groundwater activities to enable it to take a risk-based approach to regulating groundwater activities. Defra suggested “a more practical approach” to regulation that could include returning treated water to the ground following the clean-up of a pollution incident, and bringing in new protections for groundwater.
The EA would offer a wider range of permits for activities that affect groundwater, which Defra said would still ensure “strong protections” remained.
New permits could also cover activities such as introducing heat pollution or microbial pollution to groundwater, which currently apply to surface, bathing and drinking water.
Defra and the EA set out a plan to modernise abstraction in the 2017 Water Abstraction Plan, which outlined future reforms as part of the government’s 25 Year Environment Plan. This included consolidating licensing to bring environmental permits under a single legal framework.
Environment minister Rebecca Pow said: “Our 25 Year Environment Plan laid out our core commitment to ensuring the provision of clean and plentiful water.
“To deliver on that pledge in a changing climate we need to look at how we can better support those who take water from our rivers and aquifers while building on existing protections for these resources and the ecosystems they support.”
Following the two consultations that run to December, the EA will move abstraction and impounding licensing to the Environmental Permitting Regulations (EPR) in 2023 with all existing licences becoming environmental permits. By 2027 the EA will update all its licensing strategies.
Please login or Register to leave a comment.