Working in partnership

Working together to look after the regions rivers

Partnerships are central to the way we work as rivers do not follow neat geographical or organisational boundaries. This means we need a joint approach with the Environment Agency, The Rivers Trust, regional rivers trusts and other third sector groups. We’re supporting with £1.5m investment to achieve our ambitious shared vision to enable free passage in all of Yorkshire’s rivers, encouraging the return of iconic fish such as the Atlantic salmon.

We’re currently co-designing our plans for beyond 2025, exploring additional co-funding opportunities and setting more aspirational goals. One goal is to open up more length of river, allowing free fish passage and through partnership projects like DNAire and Living Heritage of the River Don, deliver a wider range of benefits. The benefits of projects like these could include community engagement, recreation, volunteering and training so we’re able to build greater resilience into the catchments and partnerships.

Our rivers are social amenities so we want to support in opening up access to disadvantaged communities, that’s why having partnerships with different organisations is really important.

We have developed an excellent relationship with the Rivers Trust and the Environment Agency who strongly endorse our partnership approach. We aim to build on this great foundation and are at the start of a strategic partnership with The Rivers Trust to scrutinise our plans and assure any planned river improvements are beneficial for all parties and are as effective as possible.

Resilience fund 

As part of our River Resilience fund, we’re sponsoring catchment officers who will be involved in delivering great work for the Aire, Don and Calder catchments. With the River Resilience project in place, we've seen 75 volunteers working in the catchments giving a whopping 1,132 hours of their time to help survey and improve river habitats, and plant 2,200 trees.

The catchment officers are helping us achieve our ambitions for the Aire, Don and Calder catchments. The roles we have sponsored include a Habitat Fisheries Officer, Agricultural Officer, Catchment Partnership Officers and Catchment Manager. They are specialists who will create catchment plans, deliver fish pass maintenance, help to improve habitats, run river clean ups, work with farmers and landowners, and many other brilliant things!

Match funding projects

We’ve also secured £1m matched funding for CABA partnerships for projects. We’ll be increasing the funding we provide to support partners with river monitoring, river improvement and surface water management schemes.

As part of this, we’re working closely with the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA), the NYMNPA and the Environment Agency to support the aims of the Esk Pearl Mussel Strategy. This includes funding water quality monitoring, infrastructure upgrades and habitat conservation work, as well as the captive breeding of mussels at the FBA’s Windermere facility.

We’ve worked with the National Park to support a £500k ERDF project (Blue Corridors) where our own water quality monitoring has been integrated in wider citizen science monitoring led by the Park, alongside habitat and fish passage outcomes.