The Bishop of St Albans received the following written answers on 22nd February 2021:
The Lord Bishop of St Albans asked Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that farmers involved in the Environmental Land Management Scheme are adequately compensated for the impact of introducing nature-based solutions on future flood risk on their land.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con, DEFRA): We are working with stakeholders and end users to determine the specific land management actions that will be paid for under the Environmental Land Management scheme. We will set out more details on this later this year. The Path to Sustainable Farming: An Agricultural Transition Plan 2021 to 2024’ set out examples of the types of actions that we envisage paying for under the Environmental Land Management scheme. This included the potential to contribute to reducing the risk of harm from environmental hazards such as flooding with natural flood management. We will set out more details on what the Environmental Land Management scheme will pay for this later this year.
We are in the process of developing our approach to making payments under the scheme. We recognise that providing the right level of payment to participants will be critical to this. We are therefore exploring how best to balance providing a fair payment to farmers and ensuring delivery of environmental objectives, against maximising value for money and respecting our international obligations. We will also set out more details on this later this year.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans asked Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to encourage the abstraction of high flow water to reduce the amount of surplus rainwater being wasted.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con, DEFRA): The Environment Agency has worked with abstractors and the National Farmers Union (NFU) to temporarily abstract flood water to fill large reservoirs, subject to it not causing derogation to existing licensed abstractors or creating any environmental risk or damage. Where abstractors applied to take more water than their current licensed quantities, the Environment Agency assessed these as one off requests and asked abstractors to apply to vary their licences to properly reflect their needs and provide access to this water in the future.
The temporary period of high flow abstraction ended on the 7 February. The Environment Agency has so far only received 5 applications, of which 3 were approved. This reflects the fact that most farm reservoirs are already full due to the wet winter and saturated soil conditions. The NFU does not anticipate any further requests from their members to extend the period of high flow abstraction beyond this date.
This initiative follows on from the so called ‘flexible abstraction’ approach that the Environment Agency implemented over the last few years to help farmers with water availability during prolonged dry weather, including refilling reservoirs outside of licensed abstraction periods when river flows were sufficiently high to protect other abstractors and the environment.
We highlighted the potential of high flow abstraction to help abstractors improve access to water in our Water Abstraction Plan, published in 2017. Since then the Environment Agency has undertaken trials to investigate its feasibility. It has published results in the relevant Abstraction Licensing Strategies, for the Lincolnshire Witham and the East Midlands Idle and Torne. In the Witham Catchment, it concluded that high flow abstraction could be used to fill reservoirs throughout the year. However, in the Idle and Torne catchment, it concluded that high flows are important for controlling sedimentation and that more evidence would be needed before any high flow abstraction licences could be granted.
The Environment Agency will continue to consider applications for new and varied abstraction licences on a case-by-case basis to ensure maximum access to water is possible whilst protecting the rights of other abstractors and the environment.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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