Welcome to the Environment Agency’s online consultation hub

We asked for your opinions and comments on our proposed classification of water stressed areas in England for the purpose of compulsory metering.

We received 54 responses in total. Of these responses, 28 were from individuals, 9 were from water companies, 8 were from environmental groups and charities, 7 were from public or nationally representative bodies and 2 were from businesses. The responses included a range of comments and views which have been summarised in the consultation response document.

Having reviewed the evidence and all consultation responses we carried out some more tests to check the results. We wrote to the Secretary of State with our advice on water stress and he determined the following areas will be classified as areas of serious water stress: 

• Cambridge Water
• Portsmouth Water
• South Staffordshire Water
• Severn Trent Water – excluding Chester zone
• Veolia Water
• Wessex Water
• South West Water – Bournemouth
• South West Water – Isles of Scilly

This consultation was for the Transboundary Impact Assessment (TIA) submitted by FCC Recycling (UK) Ltd as part of their application to vary their radioactive substances activity permit for the Lillyhall Landfill site in West Cumbria. The consultation took place from 4 February 2021 to 5 March 2021. It provided the opportunity for the public, professional bodies and stakeholders to provide comments on the TIA.

This was in addition to the consultation on the full application to vary the Lillyhall landfill site permit, which took place from 4 March 2019 to 6 May 2019.

We received zero responses to the TIA consultation. Therefore we have not produced a summary of consultation responses document, as we have done for the consultation on the full application to vary the Lillyhall landfill site permit.

We have now reached our final decision on this application and issued the permit variation on 15 July 2021.

A copy of all the documents relevant to this permit variation, including the permit, variation and decision document, can be found by visiting the original consultation ‘Lillyhall Landfill Site RSA Permit Variation’ - Please see link below.

We consulted on the application to vary the radioactive substances environmental permit for Sizewell B Power Station from 19 August 2020 to 1 October 2020. It provided the opportunity for the public, professional bodies and other stakeholders to provide comments on the application.

We received 16 responses to the consultation from various stakeholders. The responses included various comments and questions which have been summarised in the decision document (found below under ‘Files’).

We assessed the application and the consultation responses were considered as part of determining the application. We issued the permit variation on 1 September 2021. The key changes to the permit are:

• a change the annual limit and quarterly Notification Level for carbon-14 disposals to air;
• Condition 2.3.3 (c) relating to on-site incineration has been removed;
• an information requirement has been added (IC5) which requires the Operator to carry out chemical analysis of the gas released from the gaseous radioactive waste system to determine the relative amounts of methane and carbon dioxide that is discharged and report the results;
• Table S3.4 has been amended to reflect changes to legislation relating to the trans-frontier shipment of radioactive waste and spent fuel.