The Farming Rules for Water have been reviewed and found sufficiently supported for amendment, despite the review being unable to establish whether three of the four original objectives are being met. The sample bottle has requested a second opinion from a glass with fewer reservations.
On 26 April 2026, the Regulatory Policy Committee issued its formal opinion on the post implementation review of the Farming Rules for Water. It judged that the evidence gave Defra a sufficient and proportionate basis for recommending amendments. It rated the recommendation Green, monitoring and implementation Good, and evaluation Satisfactory.
This is not quite the same as discovering that the rules worked. The review says the regulations are not yet fully achieving their objectives, while also saying that the available evidence is sufficient to support changing them. Three objectives cannot be properly assessed, one is not being met, and the paperwork has nevertheless reached the administrative equivalent of carry on, but differently.
The evidence included farm statistics, Environment Agency data, academic literature, soil nutrient balances and stakeholder feedback. It also included gaps. Comprehensive compliance data for the wider population was unavailable, making it difficult to measure effectiveness. The review noted that a proper counterfactual would be useful too, presumably so the policy can discover what would have happened had it been doing something else.
The calculations also declined to become too ambitious. The review did not fully monetise the policy costs and benefits, although it estimated that slurry storage costs may have risen from the £81 million forecast in the 2016 impact assessment to £123 million in 2023 prices. The benefits remained less eager to be converted into a reassuring number.
There is a genuine practical problem underneath the comedy. Farmers face overlapping rules, including requirements that can be focused on outcomes in one place and precise standards in another. The committee also noted that the enforcement objective was not being met, while the policy leaned heavily on advice. The sample bottle has now been advised to comply voluntarily with every regulation it can see.
Defra intends to identify options for amending the framework, but the opinion does not provide a detailed timetable or specific policy changes. That leaves the review in the ideal bureaucratic position: confident enough to recommend another version, cautious enough not to describe the current one, and perfectly happy to send the next document into the field to find out what happened to the evidence.
Source: GOV.UK.
