Public participation in river basin planning

River basin planning involves everyone who is interested in, or may be affected by, the water environment and the way in which it is managed. Northern Ireland has a layered approach to public involvement, based on a Northern Ireland Water Framework Directive Stakeholder Forum, linked to a network of nine Catchment Stakeholder Groups. These have been formed to provide a forum for anyone interested in local water issues to identify their concerns to both statutory agencies and non-government organisations and have these addressed at a local level.

Find out how we are working together to implement the plans in the North Eastern, the North Western and the Neagh Bann River Basin Districts.

Last year we published three draft River Basin Management Plans for consultation. The consultation closed on 22nd June 2009 and 72 respondents provided in excess of 900 comments on a wide range of issues relating to the draft Plans, technical and local issues. We would like to thank all of those who responded. The comments and suggestions we received helped us revise our proposals to improve the water environment and have been addressed in this Plan.

We recorded, reviewed and collated your responses into a series of five consultation response documents. These response documents can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader and we recommend, if possible, that you use the latest version (version 9) as enhanced search functionality is available.

Please refer to the Instructions for Searching Consultation Responses (.PDF 592Kb) which gives help on searching and also provides a List of Respondents.

If you view the Consultation Response Documents (.PDF 2.30Mb), you will be able to see all five consultation response documents, a full list of topics covered and an explanatory list of acronyms used in the response documents.

A Summary of Responses (.PDF 1.07Mb) document has also been produced to demonstrate how the Plans have been amended, where appropriate, to address the comments received.