PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
(20 November 2024)

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 20 November 2024 to Question 13929 on Water Abstraction: Licensing, what the regional breakdown of these water abstraction licences was in each of the last 10 financial years.

Asked by:
Ben Goldsborough (Labour)

The number of water abstraction licences (temporary, full and transfer) live for all or part of the financial year for each of the last ten financial years is shown in the tables below. This data is shown by former Environment Agency (EA) regions.

This had been done by former EA regions to ensure consistency and allow comparison, as the EA changed its area boundaries in 2016.

For the purposes of this analysis, the boundary of each former EA region is river catchment based.

Also, these figures are for the country of England only. Figures for the former ‘Wales’ and ‘Midlands’ EA regions only include water abstraction licences with abstraction points located in England.

Former EA Region	2014/2015	2015/2016	2016/2017	2017/2018	2018/2019
Anglian	4761	4717	4610	4488	4556
Wales	450	447	434	408	413
Midlands	3566	3506	3481	3386	3299
North East	2184	2162	2140	2065	2033
North West	1657	1675	1645	1615	1606
South West	2225	2179	2165	2049	2023
Southern	1702	1669	1642	1631	1567
Thames	1689	1672	1648	1607	1603
Total	18234	18027	17765	17249	17100

Former EA Region	2019/2020	2020/2021	2021/2022	2022/2023	2023/2024
Anglian	4466	4507	4580	4640	4656
Wales	412	471	474	471	465
Midlands	3277	3339	3320	3482	3447
North East	2028	2115	2104	2152	2157
North West	1576	1580	1600	1621	1609
South West	2002	1999	2021	2055	2054
Southern	1566	1551	1639	1687	1677
Thames	1613	1622	1648	1706	1714
Total	16940	17184	17386	17814	17779

Answered by:
()

1 January 1970