Source · Select Committees · Environmental Audit Committee
Recommendation 76
76
Acknowledged
Paragraph: 372
Pollution across river catchments must be progressively reduced from all sources in the catchment until...
Recommendation
Pollution across river catchments must be progressively reduced from all sources in the catchment until it does not exceed the capacity of the land and the rivers to handle the nutrients. We therefore recommend that DEFRA direct the Environment Agency and Natural England to calculate nutrient budgets for each river catchment in England.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government agrees on the need to incentivise action for water body improvement through existing and future agri-environment schemes, with a focus on water quality and reducing nutrient leaching, but does not commit to calculating nutrient budgets for each river catchment.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
372
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government · verbatim extract
Acknowledged
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.
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