Plan for water has no bottle
The Government’s Water White Paper, Water for Life, is published today. The measures outlined could reduce water use and better safeguard wetlands but action is delayed and concerns about urban flooding and over-abstraction are fudged.
Carrie Hume, Head of Conservation Policy at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust said: “Wetland drainage systems that soak up floodwater in towns and cities are easy to create, often inexpensive and highly effective.
“But standards for their installation have still not been published while the concept of retrofitting around existing urban areas is all but ignored.
“And the Government has offered disappointingly little to encourage reduced water use. Water meters do cut consumption and stronger inducements promoting their installation could have been very effective.
“Unless we harness the power of nature to help prevent flooding we are in for a seriously tough time with major flooding events like those of 2007 in Gloucestershire, which cost £3.4 billion, readily happening again.
“And unless we seriously tackle over-abstraction from rivers and elsewhere, it’ll be crisis management for our children because we didn’t have the bottle to tackle the problem when we had the chance.”
