To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many water abstraction licences for hydro-electric schemes the Environment Agency has (a) received an application for, (b) issued and (c) refused in (i) England and (ii) Wales in each of the last three years. (275947)

The number of abstraction licence applications received and new abstraction licences granted for hydropower schemes are given in the following table. The Environment Agency introduced a national Water Resources authorisations receipt tracking system in November 2008. As a result, data on the number of applications received and refused are only available from November 2008 onwards. Prior to this, information was not held centrally. To collate pre-2008 data would incur disproportionate costs.