Riparian Watercourse Guidance

Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC) are in the process of updating their riparian guidance document to make it more useful for those living next to a watercourse. As this document is aimed at residents and landowners, CCC wish to seek their views and get a better understanding of their awareness of riparian issues. CCC have therefore prepared a short survey (5 questions). This survey is to understand the communities awareness about living next to a watercourse (ditch, dyke, stream, river) or water body (lake, reservoir, pond) and gauge their support and suggestions for new guidance proposed as part of the Cambridgeshire Community Flood Action Programme.

Cambridgeshire’s Community Flood Resilience Programme is a one-year county council funded programme to increase the county’s resilience and ability to adapt to flooding through improving access to flood risk management information, improving data quality, and providing guidance on asset management and support for local groups to establish community flood plans.

The programme is intended to deliver the following outcomes:
• Communities can access flood risk information more easily
• Communities can report flooding easily, with efficient back-office data collation.
• Communities in Cambridgeshire have flood groups and flood plans to aid local resilience and ensure increased positive engagement with risk management authorities.
• Improve the county’s data on riparian owned drainage assets
• Riparian owners are more aware of their responsibilities and understand what maintenance of watercourses involves and who to ask for assistance.
• Riparian watercourses that were in poor condition during the Christmas floods are cleansed during 2021/22.

A link to the survey is here: https://forms.office.com/r/5HQbNqGtba

This survey will be open until 30th September.

In addition, they would be grateful of any photos communities may have of watercourses, to include in the guidance document. If anyone would like to submit photos, please email them to , and include the name they would like to be credited as.