Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

moved Amendment No. 353A:"After Clause 92, insert the following new clause—" ““POWERS RELATING TO LAND DRAINAGE (1)   The Water Resources Act 1991 (c. 57) is amended as follows. (2)   In section 165 (general powers to carry out flood defence and drainage works), after subsection (1)(c) insert— ““(d)   to maintain, improve, construct, modify or remove any works or structures to maintain, enhance or restore the natural function of rivers and their associated floodplains, or do any other act required for the purpose of improving the natural environment.”” (3)   In subsection (2) of that section after ““for the purpose of defence against sea water or tidal water”” insert ““or to restore the natural coastal environment””.”” The noble Baroness said: With this amendment we move back to the Bill’s wider purposes which, as it says in the Long Title, are concerned with the natural environment and to make provision in connection with wildlife and sites of special scientific interest. The amendment is concerned with those particularly important contributors to biodiversity and wildlife and our natural environment; namely, rivers and wetlands. When the Water Act 2003 was going through your Lordships’ House we were concerned, as were the Conservative Benches, that the Water Framework Directive would be implemented simply by secondary legislation and not through primary legislation. Here in the amendment we have one of the first examples of why we were right to be concerned. Technically, the Environment Agency—as the Minister knows—is the competent agency to implement the provisions for the Water Framework Directive, which aims to restore our wetlands, rivers and water quality to a high quality by 2015. However, its powers come from the Water Resources Act 1991, which was amended by the Environment Act 1995; and sadly not by the recent Water Act. The difficulty is that under the previous two Acts the Environment Agency has only certain powers. They include the power to serve notices on anyone impeding the flow of a river and to require consent for actions that could impede water flow or drainage; and to take actions on water courses to maintain existing works or construct new ones; and to undertake sea defences. However, as currently constructed those powers would allow the Environment Agency to deny consent for new works on the basis of damage to the environment, or to allow it to take action to restore natural rivers and flood plains or coastal functions for the purposes of environmental enhancement. My amendment, taken alongside the proposals in Clause 92 to amend the EA’s bylaw-making powers would go a long way to correct that fact. If we address that through this Bill, we will start to make progress towards numerous targets for the natural environment. This amendment is necessary for two reasons: to underpin the Environment Agency’s role in implementing the Water Framework Directive, and to ensure it is able to protect and restore wetland and aquatic biodiversity effectively. As I have just mentioned, it has the power to do all sorts of things that might require it to have almost the opposite effect on wetland and aquatic biodiversity without the new additional powers that it needs. At this time of night, I shall not go into the Water Framework Directive at significant length. I have tabled an Unstarred Question and I hope to get a date for it soon. But the directive offers substantial opportunities for improving our wetland environment, and I am sorry that the opportunity will again be missed in this Bill to give the Environment Agency the powers it needs to do so. In the water environment, only the Environment Agency has the strategic planning function and the on-the-ground capacity and expertise to restore the physical condition of water for the benefit of the environment. However, as the agency admits in its briefing, it does not have those powers. The agency seems happy to wait substantially longer; it supports the principle in this amendment, but believes that thorough consideration is needed of the legislation required in order to implement the Water Framework Directive. To that end, the agency says it is identifying through various projects the pressures and impacts of flood defence and land drainage and what new powers may be needed to address them. The timescale is pretty short: 2015 may sound a long way off, but it is not. If we were going to restore our rivers and wetlands comprehensively, these powers should be in place already. I regret that in the Water Act we were not able to bring them in, and there is another missed opportunity in this Bill. At this stage in the Bill, it is difficult to do justice to this matter, but I believe it is of immense importance. I beg to move.