Britain's depleted rivers face new water level crisis

Britain's top environmental watchdog is finalising measures that will cause more water to be pumped from the country's already diminished rivers and underground aquifers - with devastating effects on wildlife and the countryside - The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Experts say that rivers are now facing one of their biggest ever crises.

The move comes just days after the watchdog, the Environment Agency, issued a stark warning about record low water levels across England and Wales following this year's drought. It also flies in the face of years of campaigning by the agency to rescue 40 rivers facing ruin because of "overabstraction" of water for homes, industry and farmers.

The measures are being developed at the insistence of ministers who believe that they will increase "efficiency" by bringing free market principles to bear on water supplies. Even at the best of times rivers are critically short of water. The Environment Agency's own reports show that far too much is taken from them in summer throughout the South-east and in much of East Anglia and Humberside. Almost everywhere else they are fully exploited, leaving the North-east as the only area with spare water.

Most of the country's underground aquifers, which determine the level of the water table, are similarly fully used or overexploited. Official reports show that, as a result, 26 of Britain's nationally or internationally important wetlands have been damaged by being starved of water, and another 171 are "at risk".

The agency says that most of the rivers in England and Wales have less than half their average water flows for this time of year, with the Eastern Rother in Sussex down to 8 per cent. Groundwater supplies have also been seriously hit. Such dry spells are likely to become increasingly common as global warming takes hold.

The new measures, it admits, will make a bad situation even worse, by causing more water to be taken from the most environmentally sensitive areas.

The measures are enshrined in the new Water Act, which received royal assent last week, but are being vigorously opposed by environmental and fishing groups.

They will increase abstraction by allowing people and companies who are licensed to take a fixed amount of water from rivers and boreholes to sell the rights to take any of it they do not use.

Opponents say this will be devastating because at present only about 60 per cent of the water that could be taken under the country's 46,000 licences is actually abstracted.