32 Facts About Environment Agency

Environment Agency is a non-departmental public body, established in 1996 and sponsored by the United Kingdom government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with responsibilities relating to the protection and enhancement of the environment in England.

Environment Agency's stated purpose is, "to protect or enhance the environment, taken as a whole" so as to promote "the objective of achieving sustainable development".

Environment Agency was created by the Environment Act 1995, and came into existence on 1 April 1996.

On 1 April 2013, that part of the Environment Agency covering Wales was merged into Natural Resources Wales, a separate body managing the Welsh environment and natural resources.

Environment Agency is the principal flood risk management operating authority.

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The Environment Agency is responsible for increasing public awareness of flood risk, flood forecasting and warning and has a general supervisory duty for flood risk management.

Environment Agency is responsible for operating, maintaining and replacing an estimated £20 billion worth of flood risk management installations.

Environment Agency provides flood forecasting and warning systems and maintains maps of areas liable to flood, as well as preparing emergency plans and responding when an event occurs.

The Environment Agency carries out an advisory function in development control – commenting on planning applications within flood risk areas, providing advice to assist planning authorities in ensuring that any development is carried out in line with the National Planning Policy Framework.

Environment Agency is the main regulator of discharges to air, water, and land – under the provisions of a series of Acts of Parliament.

Environment Agency has an important role in conservation and ecology specifically along rivers and in wetlands.

Environment Agency is a regulator for the release of air pollutants into the atmosphere from large, complex industrial processes.

The Environment Agency has an Air Quality Modelling and Assessment Unit that aims to ensure that air quality assessments for permit applications, enforcement and air pollution incident investigations are consistent, of a high standard and based on sound science.

Environment Agency is the regulatory authority for all waste management activities including the licensing of sites such as landfill, incineration and recycling facilities.

In serious cases the Environment Agency has the power to revoke the environmental permits issued to sites that contravene the conditions of their permits stopping all waste handling activities.

Environment Agency has a duty to maintain and improve the quality of surface waters and ground-waters and, as part of the duty, it monitors the quality of rivers, lakes, the sea and groundwater on a regular basis.

Environment Agency manages the use and conservation of water through the issue of water abstraction licences for activities such as drinking water supply, artificial irrigation and hydro-electricity generation.

Environment Agency is a regulator of angling and sells over a million rod licences a year.

The Environment Agency's lock-keepers maintain and operate systems of sluices, weirs and locks to manage water-levels for navigation, and where necessary to control flooding.

Environment Agency's responsibilities include the non-tidal River Thames, the Medway Navigation, River Wye and River Lugg, the Royal Military Canal and the Fens and Anglian systems.

The Environment Agency is organising the Fens Waterways Link a major construction project to link rivers in the Fens and Anglian Systems for navigation.

Environment Agency is the harbour authority for Rye and the conservancy authority for the Dee Estuary.

The Environment Agency has published information about tidal bores, these being the Trent Aegir and the Severn bore.

In local government planning processes, the Environment Agency is a statutory consultee on all planning matters from county strategic plans down to individual planning applications.

Environment Agency is an advisory board member of the River Restoration Centre at Cranfield University.

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The Environment Agency now advises Government directly about those issues within its purview.

The report highlighted that the Environment Agency had not reached its targets for maintaintaining flood defence systems and producing catchment area plans, and that since 2001 the general conditions of assets had not improved significantly.

Environment Agency directors attracted criticism when it emerged that shortly before the floods they had received five-figure "performance bonuses", with numerous calls for the bonuses to be donated to flood relief funds.

The Environment Agency should provide a more specific flood warning system for infrastructure operators, work with local responders to raise awareness in flood risk areas and work with telecoms companies to roll out telephone flood warning schemes.

George Fleming, who chaired the committee which produced the Learning to Live with Rivers report argued that the Environment Agency had too many roles and faced too great a conflict between its roles as habitat protector and planning regulator and suggested it was time to break it up and create a dedicated Flood Management Agency.

Additionally, the Environment Agency was accused of misleading the public by stating that its chairman Philip Dilley was "at home with his family" when he was at his wife's family home in Barbados.

The conventional approach to flood defence, carried out by the Environment Agency, and financed largely by the Treasury, is at best inefficient.