So it does not necessarily make sense to deal with policies on development and housing in separate urban and rural boxes. Even an issue like wildlife is not necessarily clear-cut. We tend to think of wildlife as largely a rural issue, but in practice suburbia is becoming increasingly important as a reservoir of biodiversity. There is no doubt that water policy is of major importance, as the recent floods have shown. There is also no doubt that it is a major factor in any rural policy.
Agriculture relies on it, but it can also be a major source of water pollution.
However, it is not just a rural issue, and it is crucial that our policy for water should consider rural and urban needs and problems together so that we achieve a comprehensive solution. It is because of the need for a co-ordinated approach on so many environmental policies that the DETR and MAFF both sponsor the Environment Agency. Unless one were to give the department of rural affairs the whole gamut of environmental policy, there would still have to be some form of joint sponsorship. That is another example of the difficulty in achieving perfectly tidy boundaries. In other words, this is an open-ended debate on which there is unlikely to be total consensus.