Ms Mary Gurrie:

I will cover the risk assessment first and the figure of 6%. The EPA is tasked under the water framework directive and the regulations with characterising the pressures on our water bodies. We do that every river-based management plan cycle. We use all our monitoring data for our rivers and lakes - all our water bodies, transitional and coastal, and groundwater - and look at the pressures that might be causing the water body to be at risk of not meeting the objective. The objective is either good or high status, depending on the water body. The assessment of all the pressures is what comes up with the 32% at-risk figure. That is then broken down into types of pressure such as agriculture, urban wastewater, forestry, abstractions - all the different types of human activities that can have an impact. A total of 50% are impacted by agriculture but a water body can be impacted by multiple pressures so that is where the numbers come in. The assessment for abstractions, which was done for the last river-based management plan, came up with a figure of 6%. That used the data based on our knowledge of abstractions at the time. We oversee the national hydrometric monitoring programme so we have all the river flow data levels and we have the water quality information so that all gets put into a model and comes up with the assessment of 6%-----