Owning a watercourse
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Your responsibilities and rules to follow for watercourses on or near your property, and permissions you need to do work around them.
Adapted edition
- Document type
- Reference Guide
- Format
- DOCX
- Pages
- 7
- Language
- English
- Version
- 1.0
- Updated
- 2026-09-17
- Category
- Safety & operations
- Licence
- Open Government Licence v3.0
Description
Your responsibilities and rules to follow for watercourses on or near your property, and permissions you need to do work around them. Consult the original guidance for current legal and operational details.
Contents
- Find out if you own a watercourse
- Owners: your responsibilities
- Report an problem
- Let water flow naturally
- Prevent pollution
- Protect wildlife
- Get advice about owning a watercourse
- Manage flood risk: rules and responsibilities
- Flood defences on your land
- When an authority stops maintaining a flood defence on your land
- Check your flood risk
- Get permission to do work in or around a watercourse
- Main rivers
- Other watercourses
- If the tide affects your watercourse
- Culverts
Source and licence
Environment Agency
AttributionEnvironment Agency, ‘Owning a watercourse’ (updated 12 February 2026), reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
ChangesNeutral text-only adaptation from the official GOV.UK Content API body: headings, paragraphs, ordered and unordered list items and clickable source-link destinations in an appendix preserved. Images, logos, page design, accessible-format request widgets and linked attachments excluded; normalised whitespace, invisible format marks and typography.
Version history
- v1.017/09/2026