Defra issues green steers for PR24

Defra has set out details of the environmental, resilience and flood risk actions it expects to see at PR24 though the twin WISER and WINEP documents.

WISER, the Water Industry Strategic Environmental Requirements, is a strategic steer to water companies from the Environment Agency and Natural England on improving the environment, resilience, flood risk, and the relevant legal requirements. It is designed to help water companies understand their environmental obligations and the regulators’ statutory and non-statutory expectations of them. It sets out the issues and opportunities companies should consider to meet those environmental obligations, as well as expected practice, and how they should step up their level of ambition.

WISER calls on water companies to demonstrate leadership to other sectors by: considering the social and economic value of the water environment, using it to inform decision making, and secure wider benefits for communities and society; embracing innovation by seeking opportunities to improve the environment through better industry practices, better urban design, and better land management; and building stronger and more collaborative catchment and flood partnerships.

Meanwhile the Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP) methodology document has been jointly developed by the EA, Defra and Ofwat with the support of others through the WINEP taskforce. It sets out the overarching process for designing, developing, and delivering the WINEP for England. The seven actions to be achieved are:

• introduce a tiered approach for including schemes in the WINEP;

• better incorporation of long-term planning in the development of the WINEP;

• establish dependencies between the WINEP and other statutory planning frameworks;

• increase the use of catchment and nature-based solutions;

• take account of wider environmental outcomes when choosing solutions;

• increase water company involvement in WINEP development; and

• increase involvement of other organisations and external funding in WINEP development.

An accompanying WINEP roadmap sets out actions for PR24 and actions to consider for PR29 and beyond.