Recommendation 49

HM Government Accepted

The Government agrees with the intention behind this recommendation and ensuring action is both collective, targeted and proportionate across catchments to address the range of pressures. Much of the detailed information and tools required are already available. There is information available nationally and at a catchment level as part of the Environment Agency’s River Basin Management Planning process; monitoring of protected sites; and other means to gain a sufficient picture of the sources of pollution and the nutrient-carrying capacity of water bodies to inform local action. In addition, we are working with Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) to help them calculate nutrient budgets and identify nutrient mitigation to allow development to continue. Natural England are proactively working with LPAs to ensure mitigation is appropriate and sufficient (see also recommendation 11,above). The Government has already set out that we will continue to focus on reducing pollution at source as a priority, to ensure that sites can be recovered and sustainable development can continue as soon as possible. Given this, we do not consider that a separate direction to Environment Agency to calculate nutrient budgets is required. However, we will keep the use of specific catchment nutrients budgets under consideration.