Welcome to the fifth issue of Water Resources East’s quarterly newsletter – the latest developments in water resources and integrated water management taking place across the Eastern region. 2024 has started off at some pace with lots of interesting announcements and developments to cover.
Firstly some team news; we have three new members of staff that we’re delighted to welcome and introduce:
- Alice Leonard started just after New Year as our new Researcher and Science Communicator. She’ll be leading on a number of technical studies as well as managing our events programme, social media and website.
- Hannah Gray began with us later in January as our Nature-based Solutions programme lead focusing on Norfolk and Cambridgeshire – more on this below. Hannah is based in Norfolk.
- Morgan Hutcheson is our most recent starter working for Hannah as our Catchment Project Officer, helping to grow our portfolio of NbS projects. Morgan is based in Cambridgeshire.
All three joined at a great time to put the finishing touches to our Business case for a Norfolk Water Fund which we published on 27th February with our core partners Anglian Water, Norfolk County Council and The Nature Conservancy. The launch webinar drew one of our largest audiences to date, who heard about the business case from its expert authors at Nature for Water and its importance to those we’re working closely with to fund and deliver pilot projects: WWF, the Norfolk Rivers Trust and the team at Swallowtail Consulting.
Another big launch, just yesterday, was the Water Strategy for Essex that we have been helping Essex County Council develop in partnership with water companies and a range of others. WRE hosted Lucy Shepherd on secondment from the council, the strategy’s lead author, during her time developing the strategy. Our chair Paul Leinster spoke at the launch event as part of Essex County Council’s Spring Climate Summit in Chelmsford on Wednesday (see right). We hope the launch will be featured on ITV News tonight in the Anglia region.
WRE was also in the news this month with the launch of a joint policy statement from Defra and DLUHC about tackling water scarcity in Greater Cambridge. The statement announced a package of measures that aims to unlock stalled growth and ensure water supplies can meet both environmental needs and growth requirements into the long-term. Water Resources East has been shaping this policy package through our membership of the Cambridge Water Scarcity Group, which will now be chaired by our chair Paul Leinster. As well as funding for WRE to conduct field trials of NbS features in the upper Cam, and to investigate new sources of supply for the county, we were delighted to see government confirm policies that will address water inefficiency in existing homes and buildings whilst tightening standards in new development. The statement also confirmed ministers intend to amend legislation to support dual pipe supplies to new homes to unlock communal rainwater harvesting and grey water recycling systems.
There’s lots of other policy news and developments that we’ve tried to summarise in the sections below: on new ‘premium’ payment rates for water-related priority actions under the ELMs Sustainable Farming Incentive, on the role of NbS measures to achieve nutrient neutrality, changes to inheritance tax for landowners with land under environmental agreements, and on proposals for new designated inland bathing waters. Work to support agricultural water resources planning is now really gaining momentum, with funding for catchment supply-demand assessments to be developed and tested in the Cam catchment, and also funding for studies into new local resources options for agricultural water use, starting in the River Thet. The WRE team was out in force at the UK Irrigation Association conference on 6th March in Peterborough (see below) where the Environment Agency explained all the work now underway to help farmers and growers plan for their future water resources needs, and from existing Water Abstractor Groups about the importance of local farm clusters coming together to investigate options and solutions. WRE board and team members also supported a first East of England Water Summit organised by EELGA on 8th March.
We’ve a busy few weeks ahead with our next Strategic Advisory Group meeting for WRE members at 10am on 27th March, and the next Technical Delivery Group and Drought Group meetings being organised. I look forward to catching up with members next week and at these and our other events coming up.
Daniel Johns, Managing Director