Drought and Drought Knowledge: The Example of Catfield Fen

Abstract

This chapter introduces specific results from a larger study on how environmental science knowledge is related to regulatory tools for managing drought and water scarcity. The focus is on the quality of hydroecological data, the role of local (expert) knowledge and power relationships between actors. These three themes will be introduced in detail and their implications showcased in the example of Catfield Fen. Catfield Fen, a wetland nature reserve, is a prime example of how the influence of a particular specific hydroecological data set exerts regulatory influence and also shows how access to a very specific data set can shape power relationships between actors.

Appendix

The following stakeholder views on the issue are extracted from the interviews as well as other publicly available material. While the preceding paragraphs summarised and discussed the main issues, the purpose of reproducing the different stakeholder views in details is to provide the full and unfiltered account of the discussion for the interested reader.

Regulators

Interview RSA.REG5

That’s a licence renewal so we’re aware of it happening at Catfield Fen. It’s not a case that the Secretary of State would normally deal with but we know what’s going on, yes but it’s a renewal case so the licence has come to an end and whether they should be renewed. I think there’s a public inquiry on that in April. We, as DEFRA would not go along to, the Inspector acts as the Secretary of State and the inspector is the chair of the public inquiry. The Secretary of State can recover appeals, so there is the opportunity for the Secretary of State to ask the Inspector to report to the Secretary of State but that’s at the Secretary of State’s discretion.

Environment Agency (2015)

The abstraction licence at Ludham Road (Catfield Fen site) was originally granted in 1988 and the Plumsgate Road licence in 1986. From circa 2000 both licences were renewed on a short-term basis, for periods of between two and five years, pending the outcome of the EA’s ‘Review of Consents’ (RoC). In September 2008, the landowner at Catfield Hall (Units 11 and 35 of the Ant Broads and Marshes Site of Special Scientific Interest [SSSI], component SSSI of the Broads Special Area of Conservation [SAC], Broadland Special Protection Area [SPA] and Broadland Ramsar) expressed concern that Catfield Fen was drying out. In December 2011 the applicant applied to renew both the Plumsgate Road and Ludham Road abstraction licences on the same terms.

In order to understand the concerns about the drying out of Catfield Fen (endorsed by Natural England [NE] in 2011), the Environment Agency (EA ) agreed to commission a report through Amec. In recognition of the contentious issue surrounding local abstraction, the EA has treated the applications as being of high public interest.

Following the Amec report, the EA undertook a groundwater modelling assessment using the EA’s Northern East Anglia Chalk (NEAC) groundwater model. Through further consultation with NE, the EA were advised that the site was not drying out, but there is ecological change—more Sphagnum sp. moss on the site, which indicates that the site is acidifying. The cause of this could be a reduction in base-rich groundwater input into the Fen.

The EA prepared its Appropriate Assessment in March 2014. This was supported by a technical report, with both reports focusing on the impacts of abstraction of the Ant Broads and Marshes component SSSI of the Broads SAC.

The EA received extensive comments from both NE and Broads Authority (BA) through the Appropriate Assessment consultation, including new information. Given the new information, and uncertainties raised by NE and the BA, the EA revised the conclusions of the Appropriate Assessment.

A public consultation was conducted, between 17 November 2014 and 15 December 2014. At the same time, NE and the BA were re-consulted on the statutory assessments.

In order to take account of relevant information received through the public consultation, an extended consultation response date was agreed with NE of 16 January 2015. This enabled NE to consider the updated statutory consultation together with the relevant public consultation responses. NE again provided extensive comments on the updated statutory assessment.

Conclusion

The EA cannot ascertain beyond reasonable scientific doubt that the abstractions will not adversely affect the site integrity of the Ant Broads and Marshes SSSI component of the Broads SAC, Broadland SPA and Broadland Ramsar, given the current fully licensed in-combination level of abstraction. This is specifically in relation to the predicted in-combination water level change at Snipe Marsh and predicted alone and in-combination water chemistry change at Catfield Fen. It is also considered that the Plumsgate Road and Ludham Road abstractions could potentially damage the Ant Broads and Marshes SSSI when considering potential changes in water chemistry. It is therefore recommended that the applications are refused.

Interview RSA.REG6

Yes, the farmer had a time limited licence and it came up for renewal and when it came up for renewal, lots of heads were scratched and a lot of work was done by the Environment Agency and Natural England and a local landowner as well, looking at the impacts of that. It is an interesting case in that it is a relatively small abstraction and it comes back to this in combination issue. When you have a relatively small abstractor but that is on top of public water supply abstraction and some of the smaller abstraction in that area; so it very much hinged around this in combination issue and how you apply that in the Habitats Regulations. So it was that side of things. Exactly how that is going to influence what goes forward with Abstraction Reform, I do not know and we won’t really know until we get the outcomes of the public enquiry.

(…)

I wasn’t involved directly in the public enquiry so I can’t tell you exactly how things went there, but I do know that the Environment Agency have put on their website, the closing submissions so that they’re available, particularly for those who are interested in this particular case. And it was a big question as to whether Anglian Water licence would end up having some sort of—for lack of a better expression—collateral damage to it, I suppose.

Interview RSA.REG4

So another very topical one which I’m not sure I should mention but I will. We’ve got one in the Broads in the Ant Broads and Marshes. So, there is again a water company licence that went through the Review of Consents and was considered acceptable. This is Catfield and then through further information that was provided partly by the landowner, it’s then come back into the process and whilst we’re currently dealing with the agricultural abstraction that is also associated with it, the EA will need to reconsider that licence. So, yes, there are instances where new data becomes available or the groundwater model didn’t pick up the sensitivities of the site.

(…)

There may be some kind of water quality information but generally not. In the example of Catfield, they looked at hydrochemistry and the potential interactions of the groundwater to the surface water and the changes. But I would say generally water quality and water resources were considered separately and then through the Review of Consents work, they considered in combination but not in a detailed way I don’t think. So you’re not putting all of that information into one document.

Water Company

Interview RSA.WC2

That’s a very live issue at the moment; whether you want to use that one as an example would be interesting. A little potted history for you—we’ve got an abstraction point up there at a place called Ludham that we’ve again been looking at probably in AMP3 originally, so 2005, that was 3 I think, to look at what the impact of that abstraction had on … it’s one of the Broads down there, I forget the name of it now, but anyway there’s a Broad nearby, and that went through the Habitats Directive process and it basically came out with a clean bill of health.

There was some debate around it but it was generally deemed okay. The agricultural licences were also in the mix at that stage and again it was generally deemed acceptable as to where we were. We agreed to do some work in AMP4 so it did drive some investment. We reduced our abstraction licence slightly and we brought some more water up I think, again from our Norwich zone or one of those zones, so that was generally deemed acceptable.

... There was another piece of Broad and it came to light very late in proceedings, that was considered to be … and this was raised by the Broads Authority that they were concerned about and that hadn’t been addressed sufficiently. An awful lot of debate and discussion and certainly I know it’s exercised a lot of EA minds over the last year or so on this.

We haven’t particularly been involved in those discussions because what’s triggered it was the renewal of one of the agricultural licences, and it goes through a period of consultation and advertising and it was that licence application that was challenged. What is happening now is that we are being drawn into that, there’s an in-combination impact and we are part of the in-combination impact but our licence as yet to date nothing formal has come of that.

We’ve had some letters and we’ve reached an agreement with the EA to say that as an interim measure, you haven’t flagged this soon enough for us to put a solution in place now, we will do something in AMP7 and as AMP6 we will reach an interim solution that we try and reduce our abstraction on Ludham, recognising that you’ve had these challenges from elsewhere. It’s a very interesting case study. I’m concerned about where it’s taking us, because it is fundamentally questioning what’s happening in terms of all this groundwater modelling and where we’ve got to previously, and that’s my concern and I think the EA’s concern on that as well.

So you find yourself in some silly situations sometimes where it might be the original boreholes that maybe … not in this case, Ludham they’re all quite local, but there are certainly some cases where it’s the original boreholes which aren’t necessarily being challenged through the renewal, the variation process.

Anyway we as a company wouldn’t say, no, we’ll just carry on abstracting from those boreholes because in theory it’s a licence of right, we can. Again we wouldn’t do that, but you do get yourself into some silly situations. It’s just the quirk I suppose of the licencing system. I think that’s where we are at Ludham, I think there is that variation piece that we would be renewing at some stage but it is a little way off. What we’ve essentially said up there is that, fine, we recognise …

It’s very difficult when you get into these sorts of challenges, and you go back to … there’s quite a few high profile and high powered people involved, and various experts been employed here and here on each side and you get two people arguing, it’s quite easy, as I’m sure you appreciate, to pick holes in an argument, in a model and things like that. It doesn’t take long before you can start unravelling a model and say that’s where I’m concerned. It’s the best tool that we have available now, do we really want to be unpicking these things? I’m not comfortable with where we could end up, but I know that’s where the challenges are coming in at the moment.

Abstractor Groups

Interview RSA.ABS2

Catfield is a farm with two licences that were first granted in 1985 and in 2010 and questions were raised about whether they were having an unacceptable impact on the neighbouring fen, Catfield Fen. One of the many interesting things for me is this concern about just how complicated all this stuff is going to get in the future because what I realised, was that this highly sophisticated Environment Agency groundwater model that I’ve already mentioned had investigated these two Catfield licences and decided that it wasn’t having an impact on the fen. I am pretty sure the Agency might reject this but I think that the model still shows that.

There is a lot more to Catfield than meets the eye. So the Agency was minded to, after five years of investigation, this time last year or some time in 2014, was minded to grant the licences and then new evidence came forward and, to my mind, the evidence revolved around … the opposition to grant the licence questioned the Agency’s groundwater model and it questioned it on two counts. Firstly, that the model is only capable of looking at the environmental impact of the cumulative effect of licences in a catchment, and it is just not possible to run this type of model to understand the impact of these one or two licences. So that’s introducing an element of doubt. That was the first one.

Then the second one revolved around the environmental impact being as a consequence of water quality, namely water pH, and the question mark around where the model that’s all geared up to understand the relationship between abstraction and flow, whether it was capable of understanding water quality. You’ll appreciate that I’m talking to you as a layman, but I think that when those two questions were introduced by those who opposed the granting of the licence, that took us into the realms of precautionary principle, because then the Environment Agency says we cannot show sufficiently that the abstraction isn’t having an adverse effect, therefore we no longer feel able to grant the licence. As I say, that is my layman’s explanation on what’s happened.

The water quality thing I think is really very interesting because the way it’s been described to me is that Catfield Fen is obviously peat because it’s a fen and it’s sat over a saucer of clay, and below the clay there’s a layer of chalk aquifer. I do not think it is disputed that there are holes in the chalk that hydrologically link the peat with the chalk. It is just a question of how many there are and where are they, and you’ll never know that. So, if we have the farm and then the fen, and the farm is drawing up water from a borehole and that is presumably drawing water across the farm from under the fen. As I say, I still think the groundwater model is saying that that is not having a significant impact in terms of water volume. There is an enormous Anglian Water borehole here. So the issue about Catfield is it is having an in combination effect. If Anglian Water did not exist, presumably the farm would be okay. But this is a licence of right here so the Agency, unless it gets its act together and does something under the RSA programme…

So what happened here, what happened on the fen was that conservation organisations and the owner of Catfield Fen raised concerns about the Fen Orchid which needs an alkaline condition in which to grow. So the supposition is that the abstraction is pulling away alkaline groundwater and that the fen is benefitting from less alkaline water but more acidic rainfall. So that impact is changing the pH of the soil on the fen which is having an adverse impact on the population of Fen Orchid, and the precautionary principle means that it’s the responsibility of the farmer to prove that that’s not happening.

The farmer is reserving the right to go to public enquiry but the licence has been refused he farmer is talking to the Environment Agency about whether he can construct a reservoir but that is not looking particularly possible. So he’s going to need to think about gradually moving out of irrigated crops, which has income, employment and asset value implications. So if this doesn’t happen, his farm is considerably devalued. But as long as the legal process continues he is still allowed to irrigate.

Interview RSA.ABS3

There’s a site at Catfield Fen, they’re all the same. It is individual farmers and collectively we do not have the resources or the knowledge to fight anything on biological grounds and you’d have to pour huge sums of money into it to get anywhere. So essentially in a way we have accepted the biological argument because we can’t do anything about it or we think we can’t, and everything is done on the mathematical argument of how do we mitigate this to make it as easy for abstractors as possible? Because that is the easier argument to have and that’s why you have it.

You can imagine going out to count the number of snails or something that was in the river when the river was high or low, it would be a complete nightmare and you have to take this… you might have to go to an appeal on this and you’d get shot down, you wouldn’t have a prayer. Any decent lawyer would just shoot you out the water because you don’t have the level of expertise and the level of knowledge because it’s always up to the abstractor to disprove what you’re being told. That is right, you have got to disprove it. It’s not a question of they have to prove, you have to disprove.

Interview RSA.ABS1

A possible cause of the revocation of those licences in Norfolk was the fact that the guy who wanted them revoked was able to finance as many different reports and researchers and solicitors and lawyers as he could care to do, because he’s always got an unlimited pit of money where that particular subject was concerned. So he could do that but the farmers, who are on notice really, were unable to provide evidence of their own to refute what’s been put forward because they just hadn’t got the resources to do it, or to fight the case.