Fears for river pollution as UK ditches EU farming rules after Brexit

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A post-Brexit rule change will worsen the state of Britain’s rivers from the start of next year, according to reports.

As of 1 January 2024, British farmers will no longer have to follow EU regulations on reducing agricultural runoff into rivers, or a series of other measures designed to promote good environmental practices.

UK farmers have had to follow so-called cross-compliance rules under the EU’s common agricultural policy, and while many of the regulations exist in British law, there are three key gaps.

When the EU rules come to an end at the start of 2024, a rule that forces farmers to create buffer strips to separate agricultural land from water bodies, thus reducing the risk of runoff, will no longer apply, the i reported.

Rules to prevent soil erosion will also be watered down, while hedgerows will come under threat, it added.

Campaigners say that without the rules in place, farmers could operate in a way that is more damaging to the environment.

“Given that we’re already in a very bad situation, why are we losing things ... we’ve got this massive problem with water quality, but we’re regressing from the position that we’re in, which is terrible,” Lydia Collas, senior policy analyst at the Green Alliance, told the i.

The three main sources of river pollution are agriculture, sewage and urban diffuse pollution.

The Salmon and Trout Conservation charity said last year that agriculture “remains the greatest threat to the future health of riverine ecology throughout England”.

Hannah Blitzer, senior policy officer at environmental group Wildlife and Countryside Link, told the i: “Farmers want to do the right thing generally, but if the government isn’t incentivising this, then it does mean the system’s stacked against having these protections.”

And Philip Carson, UK policy lead at the Nature Friendly Farming Network, said: “Cross-compliance as a mechanism wasn’t perfect, but it upheld quite an important principle in that to receive public money from agriculture and land management, there was a basic baseline that had to be met and, with its removal, that’s not as strong any more.”

The government’s website states that cross-compliance rules end on 31 December, but environment minister Lord Benyon said this month that it “does not mean an end of protections for the environment, animals and plants”.

He added: “Existing regulations will continue to protect the environment, animals and plants, and we have consulted on new hedgerow protections.”

Wildlife and Countryside Link has warned that, from January, hedgerows will be left unprotected from inappropriate management. The obligations to leave a buffer between hedgerows and cultivated areas and to only cut outside bird-nesting season will be removed.

This could endanger already threatened species such as turtle doves, it said.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it has recently consulted on continuing hedgerow protections after the end of cross-compliance, and promised to publish a summary of the responses it had received along with its next steps “shortly”.

A spokesperson said: “We are committed to protecting watercourses as set out in the Farming Rules for Water.

“We are working with regulators to implement a more preventative, advice-led approach to monitoring and enforcement, and since 2021 the Environment Agency has undertaken more than 7,000 farm inspections, resulting in over 11,400 improvement actions.”