Expert view: Karma Ockenden

“Access to water is crucial to a large number of industries; sorting out how competing priorities will be dealt with under abstraction reform will be difficult.”

Last week, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Welsh Government published a summary of responses to their December 2013–March 2014 abstraction reform consultation. It is aptly named Making the most of every drop; decision-makers will have to, if they are to stand a chance of satisfying the multiple and fiercely competitive demands on our finite water resources.

The overwhelming impression given by the summary of responses is that access to water is crucial to a large number of industries; they will fight for their rights to it; and sorting out how competing priorities will be dealt with under a reformed system will be thorny and difficult. Even if we leave aside the detail, at a very basic level there is tension between those – for example, farmers and growers – who feel the environment receives too high a level of protection vis-a-vis abstractors and those – for example, green NGOs – who want greater protection for the environment than the consultation proposes.

The document is riddled with special pleading on grounds of “unique circumstances”: the food and drink sector and thermal power stations due to the strategic importance of their industries; water companies because of statutory requirements; the farming sector because of animal welfare and food security issues; horticulture because container-grown crops cannot survive more than 24 hours without water; and the paper industry because paper manufacturing requires consistent access to water. They all make a good case, but can’t all come out on top.

To recap, the Making the most of every drop proposals are designed to make the water abstraction management system more flexible and resilient to future pressures, and to link abstraction to water availability. Two main options are on the table: “Current System Plus”, which would use annual and daily volumetric constraints, as under existing arrangements, and “Water Shares”, which would give abstractors a share of the available water in a catchment, rather than an absolute amount.

Both avenues would facilitate water trading; replace time limits in licences with a review of catchment conditions; improve the link between abstraction charges and usage, within a cost recovery framework; take a proportionate approach to implementation (catchments would be “basic” or “enhanced” to determine the extent of reform applied); and manage discharges so their value to river systems and other users is recognised.

There are 318 responses, dominated by farming (114) but including 29 from the water sector; 18 from hydropower; five from other energy interests; and responses from sectors such as NGOs, food and drink, minerals, fish farming, metals and paper.

Many respondents do not express a preference for either Current System Plus or Water Shares, but of those who do, more than twice as many prefer Current System Plus (60) to Water Shares (25) – often on grounds of simplicity and ease of transition. There is general support for the principle of linking abstraction to availability, for facilitating trading and for making the system more consistent. There is a widespread thirst for greater clarification, more precise definition and generally better information. There are common concerns too, such as how the proposed charging arrangements will affect business costs.

Underpinning water sector responses is concern over how the proposals would impact “deployable output” – their expected yield from a water source under certain conditions, given licence and physical constraints. This drove most companies, for example, to prefer the Current System Plus option over Water Shares; to oppose gradual abstraction reductions at times of low flow; and to urge that if a Regulatory Minimum Level is set at times of low flow, this should be considered via the broader Water Resource Management Planning process.

In regard to how new annual abstraction limits should be calculated, water companies opposed all options presented, stressing that modifying licence volumes based on recent usage (by any of the proposed mechanisms) would endanger their ability to supply their customers and to trigger investment in the next planning cycle to meet this deficit in supply. Instead they called for sector-specific rules for assessing previous use and argued this should be based on historic or “designed” drought events.

In terms of how water firm discharges should be regulated to provide water for downstream abstraction without jeopardising quality objectives, the industry agreed the value of this should be recognised under the reformed system, but wanted more work done on the specifics.

Defra and the Welsh Government have multiple ongoing work streams. Westminster intends to make key decisions in 2015 with a view to legislating in the next Parliament and implementing the reforms in the early 2020s. The Welsh Government will set out its stall in its final Water Strategy due later this year.

While the patchy, outdated abstraction system we currently have desperately needs overhauling as soon as possible, even a quick glance at the tangled web of – often competing – interests regarding water resource access explains why this reform is slow-going.

Karma Ockenden is a freelance journalist