A new grants scheme is being developed by Defra. Full details are yet to be revealed, but we received the attached briefing note in early December 2017.
We will of course keep in close contacts with our Catchment Coordinator at the Environment Agency, Rob Carr, to ensure that Tyne Catchment Partnership is in the best position to bid for funds for the Tyne when the scheme goes live in 2018.
The Tyne Catchment Partnership was invited to submit projects for a £1m national fund to deliver Natural Flood Management (NFM) projects. Each project had to be for less than £50,000 from the fund, and would ideally bring match funding from other sources.
There are many opportunities for NFM projects on the Tyne, and members of the Partnership have been involved in delivering NFM projects in the past throughout the catchment. The Tyne Catchment Partnership submitted 6 proposals comprising 3 projects on urban/urban fringe catchments (the Ouseburn and River Don), upland projects in the Haltwhistle Burn and Allen Valleys catchments, and a mid-catchment project on the Whittle Burn upstream of Ovingham.
The proposals are currently being reviewed by the local Environment Agency team before being submitted for consideration against all the projects submitted nationally. Competition for the limited pot of funding will be high, but we are hopeful that at least one of these worthwhile projects in the Tyne catchment will be funded. Any unfunded projects will remain on our radar, and we will seek ways to deliver them through other means.
The Tyne Catchment Partnership is developing a project called Adopt a Stream. It is designed to engage communities, businesses and individuals and empower them to look after their local stretch of the River Tyne. The project will provide training and equipment for people to monitor and care for their rivers, and to gather critical data which will help the Tyne Catchment Partnership members to identify issues and support improvements where they are needed.
You can read more about the project here. It is being developed principally by Tyne Rivers Trust with the support of other partners. Bids for funding to support the project have been submitted and we hope to have good news soon!
Read a letter from the Tyne Rivers Trust’s chair about the recent flooding in the Tyne and the CaBA approach!
At a recent conference, Emma from Northumberland Wildlife Trust kindly collected for the Tyne a “phosphate testing kit”. This is available for any partnership member to borrow! The Tyne Rivers Trust are looking after it for now. Just get in touch if you need to use it.
We held a co-ordination meeting on the 16th March 2015. Like a mini-conference, the aim was to bring together many of the existing projects operating in this area, towards a joint shared understanding.
Ouseburn Co-ordination Meeting notes
We had presentations on the following topics:
The Ouseburn Evidence and Measures project is an initiative to improve a complex urban waterbody. The Ouseburn is a major tributary of the Tyne. It rises on agricultural land near Newcastle Airport before flowing through urban Newcastle and North Tyneside, before it reaches the River Tyne some 15km later. Nearly 166,000 people live in the catchment in over 70,000 households.
The river is classified as at Moderate Status under the EU Water Framework Directive due to high Phosphate levels. These have a measured impact on the river’s ecological health (invertebrates, fish and diatoms). The river has many and complicated or suspected causes behind this status, including sewage discharge, agricultural sources, drainage from housing and other industrial or urban areas. Because of these varied potential sources, and the diffuse nature of many of them, it has been challenging to identify appropriate actions to address the phosphate issues.
The Evidence and Measures approach
The method interrogates existing data rather than commissioning new surveys. It is designed for ‘difficult’ catchments – where the actions needed are unclear, and there is no or little consensus on what action or location to tackle first. Tyne Rivers Trust identified this as a useful approach to the Ouseburn, with the added potential benefits of bringing together current Ouseburn initiatives and projects under a co-ordinated umbrella and engaging communities in delivering outcomes.
The project covered the whole of the Ouseburn catchment with a focus on phosphate. Over a 10 month period all the existing datasets and information about phosphate inputs were gathered and analysed to give as complete and detailed picture as possible. This included pollution data, river flow data and information about consented discharges into the river. In May 2015 this information was scrutinised by the partners at an ‘Evidence’ workshop, with the data broken down into six manageable reaches. Building on the shared understanding and impetus gained, the ‘Measures’ workshop (involving the same partners and held a few weeks later) a series of actions was agreed, including:
Next steps
The partners wish to see the actions identified for the Ouseburn through to delivery. For many actions this is just ‘business as usual’ with a more Ouseburn focus, though other larger actions will require funding, investment or a change of policy.
We’d also like to build on our learning from this project. Some funding has already been identified in the Environment Agency’s Medium Term Plan for delivery of Ouseburn-specific measures and applying this forensic approach to the River Team and the River Don. Thinking even bigger, the same approach could work in the wider north-east region on similar ‘difficult’ rivers. We already know how we could be more efficient and effective, plus the stakeholders already have a shared understanding of the process. We’d like to bring and retain the evidence analysis knowledge and skills within the region, which would reduce costs as well as developing local ownership and synergies.
Funding
The Ouseburn Evidence & Masures project was funded from multiple sources, which speaks volumes about the joint commitment to see agreement and focused action on the ground. Funding came from Defra, Northumbrian Water Group, the Environment Agency, the Community Foundation, and from Defra’s Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) mentoring fund. Significant in-kind contributions, by way of staff time, were given by Tyne Rivers Trust, pjHYDRO and rUKhydro. All partners donated time through staff attendance at both workshops.
We thought it would be useful to have all in one place the details of the past Tyne Catchment Partnership meetings.
The notes taken are here to download as well as a brief summary below.
How about swimming the length of the Tyne from your local pool?
The Swimfit website we recently came across allows you to set yourself that very challenge!
Which prompted a rummage around in the office for some Tyne River facts, in case anybody wanted a New Year challenge!
Anyone setting themselves a Tyne swimming challenge, get in touch, we’d like to hear from you!
