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The Thames Barrier was completed long before the EA was created but more recent examples of major defences against coastal flooding include the Medmerry managed realignment scheme in West Sussex in 2013.
Recent examples of major inland flood prevention schemes include the Jubilee River.
The Environment Agency provides flood forecasting and warning systems and maintains maps of areas liable to flood, as well as preparing emergency plans and responding when an event occurs.
The Environment Agency carries out an advisory function in development control – commenting on planning applications within flood risk areas, providing advice to assist planning authorities in ensuring that any development is carried out in line with the National Planning Policy Framework.
The agency provides technical advice on the flood risk assessment that must be submitted with most planning applications in flood risk areas.
The Agency also runs public awareness campaigns to inform those at risk who may be unaware that they live in an area that is prone to flooding, as well as providing information about what the flood warning codes and symbols mean and how to respond in the event of a flood.
The agency operates Floodline, a 24-hour telephone helpline on flooding.
Floodline covers England, Wales and Scotland but not Northern Ireland, and provides information and advice including property flood-risk checks, flood warnings, and flood preparation advice.
In partnership with the Met Office it runs the Flood Forecasting Centre (FFC) which provides warnings of flooding which may affect England and Wales.
Formed in 2009, the FFC is based in the Operations Centre at the Met Office headquarters in Exeter.
The Agency is the main regulator of discharges to air, water, and land – under the provisions of a series of Acts of Parliament.
It does this through the issue of formal consents to discharge or, in the case of large, complex or potentially damaging industries by means of a permit.
Failure to comply with such a consent or permit or making a discharge without the benefit of a consent can lead to criminal prosecution.
Magistrates' Court can impose fines of up to £50,000 or 12 months imprisonment for each offence of causing or knowingly permitting pollution.
If prosecuted in the Crown Court, there is no limit on the amount of the fine and sentences of up to 5 years imprisonment may be imposed on those responsible for the pollution or on Directors of companies causing pollution.
The Agency has an important role in conservation and ecology specifically along rivers and in wetlands.
More general responsibility for the countryside and natural environment in England falls to the organisation Natural England.
The Environment Agency's activities support users of the rivers and wetlands, including anglers and boaters.
The Agency states that they take a "leading role in limiting and preparing for the impacts of climate change."
The Agency is a regulator for the release of air pollutants into the atmosphere from large, complex industrial processes.
This will soon include emissions from some large-scale agricultural activities, but air pollutant releases from many agricultural activities will continue to be unregulated.
Major sources of air pollution, such as transport, are subject to various measures at the European, national and local level.
Local authorities regulate air pollution from smaller industrial processes.
The Agency works with local authorities, the Highways Agency and others to implement the UK government's air quality strategy in England as mandated in the Environment Act 1995.
The Environment Agency has an Air Quality Modelling and Assessment Unit (AQMAU) that aims to ensure that air quality assessments for permit applications, enforcement and air pollution incident investigations are consistent, of a high standard and based on sound science.
The Agency is the regulatory authority for all waste management activities including the licensing of sites such as landfill, incineration and recycling facilities.
It also regulates the movement of hazardous wastes such as fibrous asbestos, infectious clinical wastes and harmful chemicals.
The Agency issues Environmental Permits to waste management sites and any individuals or companies found to have caused pollution or have infringed their licence conditions can be prosecuted.
In serious cases the Environment Agency has the power to revoke the Environmental Permits issued to sites that contravene the conditions of their permits stopping all waste handling activities.
The Agency has a duty to maintain and improve the quality of surface waters and ground-waters and, as part of the duty, it monitors the quality of rivers, lakes, the sea and groundwater on a regular basis.
Much of this information is required by law under the provisions of a number of European Directives to be reported both to Parliament and to Europe and to be made public.
Some of these duties have been in force through predecessor agencies and as a consequence the Agency maintains some long term data sets which in some cases such as the Harmonised monitoring scheme exceed 30 years of consistent data collection.
Monitoring is also carried out of many discharges to the aquatic environment including sewage effluents and trade and agricultural discharges.
The Agency manages the use and conservation of water through the issue of water abstraction licences for activities such as drinking water supply, artificial irrigation and hydro-electricity generation.
The Agency is in charge of inland rivers, estuaries and harbours in England.
Its remit also extends into Scotland in the River Tweed and River Solway catchments where special arrangements exist with SEPA to avoid duplication but retain management on a catchment basis.
Complex arrangements exist for the management of river regulation reservoirs, which are used to store winter water in the wetter parts of England to maintain levels in the summer time so that there is sufficient water to supply the drier parts of the country with drinking water.
The Agency is a regulator of angling and sells over a million rod licences a year.
It uses the proceeds (approx £20M per annum) to maintain and improve the quality of fisheries in England by improving habitat.
The Agency also regulates the commercial exploitation of shellfish.
After the Canal & River Trust, the Environment Agency is the second largest navigation authority in the United Kingdom managing navigation for of England's rivers.
The Agency's lock-keepers maintain and operate systems of sluices, weirs and locks to manage water-levels for navigation, and where necessary to control flooding.
Annual spending to maintain these installations, with an estimated replacement value of £700M, is around £22M per annum.
The Agency uses the registration fees of some 31,000 craft on the waterways to provide some of the income.
The Agency's responsibilities include the non-tidal River Thames, the Medway Navigation, River Wye and River Lugg, the Royal Military Canal and the Fens and Anglian systems.
The Environment Agency is organising the Fens Waterways Link a major construction project to link rivers in the Fens and Anglian Systems for navigation.
The first stage is the South Forty-Foot Drain.
Functions in relation to most canals are undertaken by the Canal and River Trust.
The Environment Agency is the harbour authority for Rye and the Conservancy Authority for the Dee Estuary.
The Environment Agency also publishes information about tidal bores, these being the Trent Aegir and the Severn bore.
The Agency uses its influence and provides education to change attitudes and behaviour towards the environment.
Action, in several policy areas, is directed towards business and commerce at all levels, children in education, the general public and Government and local government.
This last area is quite distinct from the Agency's statutory role to advise Government.
In local government planning processes, the Environment Agency is a statutory consultee on all planning matters from County Strategic plans down to individual planning applications.
In reality only those applications judged to pose special risks to the environment are commented on in any detail.
For many years the Agency has been offering strong advice against the development of land in floodplains because of the risk of flooding.
Whilst in some instances, this advice may not have been appreciated in its entirety, in a large number of cases this advice has been used to reach decisions on planning applications.
The Environment Agency is also an advisory board member of the River Restoration Centre at Cranfield University.
Until the formation of the Environment Agency, the Government took specialist advice on the management of the environment from civil servants employed in appropriate ministries.
This led to considerable duplication of effort and frequent disagreements between Government and the regulatory agencies.
The Environment Agency now advises Government directly about those issues within its purview.
The operational arm of the Environment Agency consists of 14 areas, all of which report to the Director of Operations.
As of April 2014, the Environment Agency removed its regional level of administration (formerly Anglian Region, Midlands Region, North West Region, South East Region, South West Region and Yorkshire & North East Region) to be replaced by an "area once, national once" model.
The 14 area names were also changed to better reflect the areas that they serve.
The new area names are:
- North East Area<br>
- Cumbria and Lancashire<br>
- Yorkshire<br>
- Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire<br>
- Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire
- Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire<br>
- West Midlands (Staffordshire, Warwickshire, West Midlands, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire) <br>
- Wessex<br>
- Devon and Cornwall
- East Anglia (Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk) <br>
- Hertfordshire and North London<br>
- West Thames<br>
- Solent and South Downs<br>
- Kent and South London
Since the establishment of the Environment Agency several major flood events have occurred and the Agency has been the target of criticism.
A number of reports have been produced which chart various developments in flood management.
At Easter 1998, the equivalent of one months rain fell in the Midlands in 24 hours and flooding caused £400m damage and five deaths.
In the light of criticism, the Agency commissioned a report from a review team under the Chairmanship of Peter Bye, a former chief executive of Suffolk CC.
The report concluded that in many respects, the Environment Agency's policies, plans and operational arrangements were sound, and that staff did their best in extreme circumstances, but there were instances of unsatisfactory planning, inadequate warnings for the public, incomplete defences and poor co-ordination with emergency services.
Specifically the report highlighted the flood warning system and said the scale of the damage could have been avoided if the agency had issued more advice to those living in the worst affected areas and noted "People who do not understand what they can do to protect themselves when they are warned are not protected."
In the Autumn 2000 floods, damage was reduced by flood defences and by timely warnings and evacuations where the defences could not hold back the water.
As a result, 280,000 properties were protected from the floods, but over 10,000 properties were still flooded at an estimated cost of £1 billion.
Defra commissioned an independent review by the Institution of Civil Engineers under George Fleming.
The review was to consider methods of estimating and reducing flood risk and look at whether flood risk management could make more use of natural processes.
Other terms of reference included the possible impact of climate change and experience of other countries.
The resulting report entitled "Learning to Live with Rivers" specifically criticised a reluctance to use computer models and inadequate representation of the dynamic effects of land use, catchment processes and climatic variability.
More broadly, the report noted that sustainable flood risk management could only be achieved by working with the natural response of the river basin and by providing the necessary storage, flow reduction and discharge capacity.
It concluded that floods can only be managed, not prevented, and the community must learn to live with rivers.
On 15 June 2007 the National Audit Office produced a report on the performance of the Environment Agency with respect to its administrative targets and information systems.
The report highlighted that the Environment Agency had not reached its targets for maintaintaining flood defence systems and producing catchment area plans, and that since 2001 the general conditions of assets had not improved significantly.
It concluded the agency could reduce the need for extra funding by improving cost effectiveness.
On the basis of the report, and to the background of the Summer 2007 floods, on 27 June 2007 the Committee of Public Accounts under Edward Leigh subjected the Environment Agency management to severe interrogation and concluded that the agency had "not delivered protection for the British people".
Issuing a strong response, the chief executive rejected the charge that the Environment Agency has massively failed, as alleged in the commons public accounts committee, noting that in the last seven years, defences had been created to protect 100,000 homes in floodplains, numbers receiving flood warning had dramatically increased and greatly improved flood mapping and forecasting had been implemented.
Following the 2007 United Kingdom floods, which left 13 people dead, 44,600 homes flooded and caused £3bn damage, Defra announced an independent review by Sir Michael Pitt.
The Environment Agency directors attracted criticism when it emerged that shortly before the floods they had received five-figure "performance bonuses", with numerous calls for the bonuses to be donated to flood relief funds.