Challenges and Choices is a great opportunity to engage with your communities, partners and stakeholders. It’s a chance to urge your partners to contribute to the consultation and to get them more involved in river basin and catchment management. Challenges and Choices gives you an opportunity to help secure commitment and investment from a wider range of partners –to support your activities and improve the water environment.

The Challenges and Choices consultation begins on 24 October 2019 until 24 September 2020. It will help shape the Strategic plan for England’s waters (river basin management plans). The consultation will ask the public, our partners and stakeholders their views on improving the water environment. The final plans, published in December 2021 will contain legally binding water environment objectives and a summary of the programmes of measures to guide Defra, the Environment Agency, water companies and catchment partnerships’ work over the next six years.

Catchment Partnerships have already contributed to developing the Challenges and Choices consultation through your catchment planning work: capturing data and prioritising action. This is the latest part of the ongoing role you have in improving the water management system.

We’d like to ask you to:

• Use the resources provided below to help you have these conversations. These include links to the e-consultation tool,  films you can tweet, briefings and other resources
• Use existing meetings and engagement events to promote the consultation
• Log the meetings you have where you’ve mentioned the consultation
• Importantly, work with your catchment partnership to compile a consultation response. Consultation responses are published on the e-consultation tool so by sending your response in early you can help to influence others about your priorities.

The light touch engagement planning work you’re doing to meet the 2019-20 national success measures on engagement will help you to identify who to contact about the consultation. It will be really valuable to get as wide a range as consultation responses as possible to help shape catchment priorities for the coming years.

When talking about the Consultation online, please use the following social media hashtags:

#ShowWaterSomeLove

#HelpSecureOurWater

Please use these in your social media to promote the consultation and your role in it. Note that hashtags are not case sensitive and there must not be spaces between words.

Sample Tweet: 

Today we launch our Challenges and Choices consultation to help identify the challenges our water environment faces and the choices we need to make to protect water in the future. Please get involved and #HelpSecureOurWater #ShowWaterSomeLove https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/environment-and-business/river-basin-management

Find template tweets here. 

The attached documents help you run a meeting/WebEx:

• Facilitation plan to ensure participants are well prepared to collate a response in the meeting (2 hours may be adequate)
• Narrative – a discussion document to help with question 1 of the consultation (your group may just want to answer question 1)
• Proforma with consultation questions – choose the questions before you meet that you would like to discuss and collate your answer in the meeting.

Then upload your responses onto the e-consultation tool.