Case study:Valley Brook Restoration Project
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Project overview
| Status | Complete |
|---|---|
| Project web site | http://https://naturalcourse.co.uk/uploads/2021/11/Valley-Brook-case-study.pdf |
| Themes | Land use management - agriculture, Water quality |
| Country | England |
| Main contact forename | Carrie |
| Main contact surname | Wright |
| Main contact user ID | |
| Contact organisation | Environment Agency |
| Contact organisation web site | |
| Partner organisations | Natural England, The Rivers Trust, United Utilities, greater manchester combined authority |
| Parent multi-site project | |
| This is a parent project encompassing the following projects |
No |
Project summary
One of the barriers catchment partnerships face is understanding what action needs to be taken to improve rivers to good status. River Basin Management Plans provide information
on why rivers are failing to achieve good and generic actions, but are not specific around how to can close the ‘gap to good’.
Valley Brook in Crewe is a small urban watercourse. It is failing water quality standards because of upstream inputs of nutrients, mainly from sewage works and agriculture, and because it has been constrained and altered as Crewe has developed. United Utilities have committed to upstream improvements at Audley sewage treatment works which will lead to significant improvements in water quality before 2024.
Next Steps Feasibility and design work has been commenced on the river restoration and partners are developing a business case. Valley Brook partnership members have started discussions with land owners to look at delivering more mitigation measures, along with identifying suitable funding streams.
Monitoring surveys and results
Project
The aim of this project was to test out the effectiveness of carrying out more detailed environmental planning on one waterbody and understand if this would drive action and improvements.
This involved three stages of work:
Stage 1 - Intelligence report
Stage 2 - Detailed environmental planning
Stage 3 - Production of the plan
Stage 1: Intelligence report The intelligence report brings all of the information e know about the brook into one place. This allowed us to identify the significant issues on the brook whilst maintaining an overview. Two main issues were identified for Valley Brook:
- Restoring a more natural flow and function to the river (mitigation measures)
- Reducing the input of phosphate from upstream catchments
Lessons learnt
Learning point:
It’s easy to get lost in the detail at this stage of the process. Concentrate on the major issues – what’s
going to make the biggest improvements.
Stage 2: Detailed environmental planning Phosphates Water quality modelling using SAGIS had already been carried out, so we knew which sectors were responsible for the phosphate and how much phosphate needs to be removed to achieve good status. The main source of phosphate was sewage treatment works and agriculture. The sewage treatment works is due for improvement before 2024
Mitigation measures
These are actions we can take to improve the ecology of a heavily modified river. Although we had previously identified mitigation measures, we asked the Environment Agency biodiversity and geomorphologist to review those
measures and they produced a river restoration report.
Stage 3: Production of the plan
The outcome of the planning, including all of the actions needed to close the gap to good were recorded in the Valley Brook catchment action plan.
Outcomes
The catchment planning led to the development of the Valley Brook Partnership, which involved local authorities, Mersey Rivers Trust, Cheshire Wildlife Trust, Groundwork and many more.The Environment Agency and Cheshire East Council and Crewe Town Council successfully bid for £2.9m of central government funding (though the town fund, and an additional £250k of Water Environment Investment Fund) recognising the importance of putting the river at the heart of the economic regeneration of Crewe. The funding will restore more natural function to a section of Valley Brook and create a green transport route along Valley Brook corridor. Funding bids have been submitted to work with farmers in the upstream catchment
Learning point:
The catchment planning for Valley Brook has created a clear narrative around action which has led to partners being able to work together to deliver outcomes and a long term commitment to improve Valley Brook
Learning point: SAGIS provides information on the source of phosphate and the percentage reductions required. Farmscoper was used to model what actions farmers need to take to achieve good status. All farms in the upstream catchments, including Engelsea Brook and the rural section of Valley Brook were included. Phosphate from agriculture needs to reduce by 88% in the upstream catchments. This will require significant land use change ,as well as wide spread uptake of other mitigation measures
Learning point: Farmscoper is a decision support tool that can be used to assess diffuse agricultural pollutant loads on a farm and quantify the impacts of farm mitigation methods on these pollutants. You can download it and guidance documents from the ADAS website
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