BART welcomes the ambition of the EIP 2025 and recognises its potential to support long-term river restoration across England. However, for rivers in the Bristol Avon catchment, and similar catchments under pressure – only a strengthened, better-resourced, enforcement-backed and locally-driven approach will deliver real environmental improvement.
We remain ready to work collaboratively with Government, regulators, landowners and communities, but we need the EIP to deliver on its promises through robust, accountable, and catchment-scale implementation.
What we support / What aligns with BART’s mission
- The EIP’s overarching ambition of “restored nature” – to protect and improve 30% of UK land and seas for nature by 2030 – aligns closely with BART’s goals around restoring river ecosystems, enhancing biodiversity and improving water quality.
- The emphasis on improving environmental quality for water (as part of the EIP’s water-quality goals) resonates directly with BART’s work on reducing diffuse pollution, restoring riparian zones, and improving river health across the Bristol Avon catchment. We also urge the government to ensure that the construction of much-needed homes has minimal impact on nearby watercourses, and that active development sites are properly monitored so best practice and effective pollution controls, including measures to prevent soil runoff are consistently in place.
- The EIP’s recognition of the need for government–community–landowner collaboration to deliver landscape-scale restoration offers an opportunity to scale up community-driven river restoration and citizen science approaches that BART already supports (e.g. through RiverHub, river-fly monitoring, catchment-scale habitat restoration).
- The plan’s support for landscape recovery through new funding streams could open up significant opportunities for long-term, large-scale interventions – floodplain restoration, natural flood management, re-meandering, habitat connectivity – all of which bode well for river resilience, biodiversity, and water quality.
Key concerns:
- Insufficient enforcement and accountability: The plan still relies heavily on voluntary action and self-regulation. Stronger regulatory oversight, clearer duties, and meaningful penalties are needed to drive compliance from polluters.
- Funding gap: The scale of work required to restore rivers far exceeds current and proposed investment. Long-term, ring-fenced funding for nature recovery, catchment partnerships and local delivery is essential.
- Over-reliance on high-level national targets: Many targets remain vague, lack interim milestones, or rely on future policy mechanisms that are not yet defined. Local delivery teams cannot plan effectively without clarity.
- Limited focus on land-use change and development pressures: The plan does not adequately address sediment, nutrient and habitat impacts from new and existing development – an escalating issue in the Bristol Avon area.
- Nature-based solutions still underpowered: Despite strong rhetoric, the plan provides no confirmed pathway for scaling NBS, securing blended finance, or supporting long-term maintenance.
- Data and monitoring gaps: Without significant investment in monitoring, transparency and real-time data, progress cannot be tracked or trusted.
To summarise:
The EIP signals intent but fails to provide the regulatory tools, investment and local delivery commitments needed to safeguard and restore rivers. BART urges government to match ambition with the practical means required for action on the ground.
