Farmer fined for abstraction permit breaches

Following prosecution by the Environment Agency, a Norfolk farmer has been fined £2,000 for taking and using more water than permitted over a four-year period that included a summer drought.

The farmer, Brian Rutterford, was found to have taken some three times the amount of water he was licenced to take, from a small channel next to his farm in Hockwold-cum-Wilton. He pleaded guilty to offences of over-abstraction between 2018 and 2022 under the two licences he held – one for summer and another for winter.

Rutterford was fined at Norwich Magistrates Court for water abstraction offences and ordered to pay £100 for breaching his suspended sentence, along with £2,000 prosecution costs and a victim surcharge of £200.

His licences required him to keep abstraction records and maintain abstraction meters, which he failed to do. In addition, his water abstraction offences were committed during his suspended sentence for another environmental offence in operating an unpermitted waste site at his farm.