Mary Burke

Intensive farming with significant drainage, with compacting soils, speeds up how water reaches the river and creates worse problems.

Absolutely.

So that is the idea.

It's this idea that we would work with private landowners, which include farmers, to talk to them about the reality of what this kind of approach means and reassure them that we are not flooding the land.

What we are doing is going to work with them to work on a catchment scale to reduce the flood risk together and talk to them about how they could be compensated for this.

I think it's very serious in terms of the consequence for meeting lots of our regulatory duties.

Could I just mention that we have the land use review, but we also have the nature restoration plan.

And my view would be that these need to be read as a single document.

Both plans mention river restoration, floodplain rewetting, riparian habitat recovery.

they all appear in both frameworks.

So it would be an absolute tragedy if the land use review was read in a silo where the nature restoration plans, it was exactly what you were speaking with your previous guest in that these lands have multifunctions.

And I do think there will be people who will have to have severe actions, but there's also loads of opportunity for collaboration here.