Septic tank regulations in England: the General Binding Rules in 2026

The General Binding Rules are the statutory conditions that let a septic tank or a small sewage treatment plant discharge legally in England without an environmental permit. There are 23 of them. Meet every rule that applies to your discharge and it is an exempt activity, with nothing to apply for and nothing to pay. Fail one and the discharge is unlawful until you hold a permit.

Two things changed in 2026, and neither has reached most of the advice still circulating: three new standard rules permits arrived on 20 April, and the rules for discharging to ground were amended on 23 July.

Most of what is written about septic tank rules online is still organised around a deadline of 1 January 2020 that no longer appears anywhere in the Environment Agency's guidance. This guide sets out the rules as they actually stand: what they require, which version applies to your discharge, every separation distance in one place, the permit routes that opened in April, and the amendment in July that made engineered ground a legitimate answer for the first time.

What are the General Binding Rules?

The General Binding Rules are conditions set by the Environment Agency that allow a small sewage discharge, from a septic tank or a small sewage treatment plant, to operate legally in England without an environmental permit. In everyday use people call them the septic tank regulations, though the general binding rules for sewage treatment plants are the same rules and apply equally. They govern four things: how much you discharge, how well it is treated, where the discharge point sits, and how the system is looked after.

They are not guidance. The conditions sit in the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016, as amended in 2023, and the Environment Agency's statutory guidance is itself part of the condition:

They apply in England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run separate regimes, so a property over any of those borders is outside this guidance entirely.

• Volume — a hard daily cap, set at a different level depending on whether the effluent goes to ground or to a watercourse.
• Treatment — a septic tank plus a drainage field for discharges to ground; secondary treatment from a sewage treatment plant for anything reaching surface water.
• Siting — minimum distances from wells, buildings, watercourses, public sewers and protected sites.
• Upkeep — installation to the manufacturer's specification, maintenance by a competent person, and sludge removed by an authorised person.

Meet every rule that applies and there is nothing to apply for. Miss one and the discharge is unlawful until a permit is in place. There is no partial compliance.

Where a development cannot connect to the mains, this is the framework a foul drainage strategy for planning has to work inside, because a planning authority will expect the regulatory route to be named before permission is granted — as it did on a scheme where drainage conditions were discharged for 24 homes on clay with no public sewer.

Do the General Binding Rules apply to you?

Almost certainly, if the property is not connected to the public foul sewer. You are the operator if you own the property the system serves, share a system with a neighbour, or are responsible for maintaining it under a written agreement such as a tenancy. Owning the tank is not the test; responsibility for the discharge is.

One qualifier does a great deal of work. Where connecting to a public foul sewer is reasonable, the Environment Agency expects you to connect rather than install or keep a private system. That test is measured in metres, and it is dealt with in full below.

Owning the tank is not the test. Responsibility for the discharge is, which is why a tenancy agreement can make a tenant the operator.

The rules also exclude certain arrangements outright, whatever their volume. A well or a borehole cannot be used to discharge waste water to ground, and a soakaway designed for draining rainwater cannot be used for sewage if it was installed after December 2007. A system discharging through either of those, or through any other kind of soakaway built for rainwater, is not a candidate for a permit at all. The Environment Agency's position on groundwater protection is that it must be replaced with a proper treatment system. This is one of the more common findings on rural sites, and it is precisely the confusion between a BS 6297 drainage field and a surface water soakaway that causes it.

Which rules apply: the new and existing discharge test

Which of the 23 rules bind you depends on when the discharge started, not on when the tank was installed. There are three tiers. Rules 1 to 14 apply to every small sewage discharge however old. Rules 15 to 21 apply to discharges that started on or after 1 January 2015. Rules 22 and 23 apply only to new discharges that started on or after 2 October 2023.

A discharge counts as new if any of the following happened on or after 2 October 2023: it started; it changed type, from ground to surface water or the other way round; it moved more than 10 metres from its previous location; or it rose above the daily volume cap for its route.

The 2020 date that dominates so much of the advice online was never a separate regime. It was the end of a transition period for septic tanks discharging to watercourses, and it has since dropped out of the guidance altogether, replaced by wording covered further down this page. Nor is there a 2022 or a 2024 set of septic tank regulations, however often those years are searched: nothing in the Environment Agency guidelines changed on either date. The dates that matter are 1 January 2015, 2 October 2023, and the two 2026 changes set out below.

A system installed before 1983 does not have to meet any British Standard, because none applied to it at the time. That exemption covers the standard the tank was built to. It does not exempt the discharge from any of the other 22 rules.

The volume limits for discharges to ground and to surface water

A discharge to ground must be 2 cubic metres or less a day. A discharge to surface water must be 5 cubic metres or less a day. Cross either line and the exemption falls away regardless of how clean the effluent is. The limits are volumetric, not qualitative.

2 cubic metres a day to ground. 5 cubic metres a day to surface water. Neither cap moves for good effluent quality.

Working out which side of the line you sit on is a flows and loads calculation, not an estimate. For a house, occupancy drives it. For a pub, a holiday let, a campsite or an office you add every source of flow together using British Water's Flows and Loads guidance, which is the method the standard rules permits name explicitly. Unda's free foul drainage flow-rate calculator and septic tank size calculator give first-pass figures for both.

That last row matters more than it looks. The two halves of the regime are no longer in step: the discharge-to-ground guidance was amended in July 2026 and the surface water guidance was not, so advice written about one does not automatically hold for the other.

The 30-metre rule: when you have to connect to the public sewer

You cannot meet the General Binding Rules if there is a public foul sewer within 30 metres of any boundary of the premises your system serves. It is measured from the boundary, not from the tank and not from the drainage field, and it decides whether a private discharge is permissible at all.

The distance scales with what the system serves. For more than one property, multiply the number of houses by 30 metres, so three houses gives 90 metres and ten gives 300. For anything non-domestic, divide the maximum daily volume in cubic metres by 0.75 and multiply the result by 30: a discharge of 1.2 cubic metres gives 1.6, which multiplied by 30 gives 48 metres.

1. Take the number of dwellings the system serves and multiply by 30 metres.
2. For any non-domestic element, divide its maximum daily volume in cubic metres by 0.75, then multiply by 30 metres.
3. Where a system serves both, add the two distances together. Three houses and a café discharging 1.2 cubic metres gives 90 metres plus 48 metres, so 138 metres.
4. Measure from any boundary of the premises served to the nearest public foul sewer, and check the result against that figure.

The 30-metre test is measured from any boundary of the premises the system serves, not from the tank and not from the discharge point.

Two separate tests use nearly the same arithmetic and are worth keeping apart. The version above is Rule 15, a hard eligibility condition. The Environment Agency applies a second, similar test when deciding whether to grant a permit at all, and there it weighs the comparative costs of connecting against installing a private system, any physical barriers in the way, and any environmental benefit from a private system such as reuse of treated effluent. It has also said it may ask you to consider connecting where a sewer is further away than the calculated distance.

One point catches developers out repeatedly. The Environment Agency will not normally grant a permit for a private system on the basis that the nearest public foul sewer lacks capacity. Capacity is a matter for the water company and the section 106 right to connect, not a reason to go off-mains. That is why a water company capacity enquiry belongs at strategy stage rather than after refusal. The state of the receiving network, the subject of the wider argument about sewage capacity and what gets built, increasingly shapes rural schemes too.

The arithmetic is harsher still under the standard rules permits. When determining a standard rules application the Environment Agency cannot look behind the distance at whether a connection is physically achievable, so a sewer inside the calculated distance pushes the application straight onto the bespoke route however impractical the connection would be in reality. What counts as a public sewer in the first place, and where the responsibility for it starts and stops, is set by BS EN 752, the standard for drains and sewers outside buildings.

The General Binding Rules in full: all 23 rules

Most published summaries give four or five of the rules. The complete set runs to 23, and knowing which number applies is how a planning officer, a solicitor or an Environment Agency officer will frame a question about your system. They are set out below in the Environment Agency's own order, with the route each applies to in brackets.

Rules 1 to 14: every small sewage discharge

• Rule 1 (ground) — the discharge must be 2 cubic metres or less per day in volume.
• Rule 2 (surface water) — the discharge must be 5 cubic metres or less per day in volume.
• Rule 3 — the sewage must only be domestic.
• Rule 4 — the discharge must not cause pollution of surface water or groundwater.
• Rule 5 (ground) — treatment from a septic tank and infiltration system, or a sewage treatment plant and infiltration system.
• Rule 6 (surface water) — treatment from a sewage treatment plant.
• Rule 7 (ground) — the discharge must not be within a groundwater source protection zone 1, or within 50 metres of any well, spring or borehole used to supply water for domestic or food production purposes.
• Rule 8 (surface water) — in tidal waters, the discharge outlet must be below the mean spring low water mark.
• Rule 9 — all works and equipment must comply with the British Standard in force at the time of installation, and with Environment Agency guidance on capacity and installation.
• Rule 10 — the system must be installed and operated in accordance with the manufacturer's specification.
• Rule 11 — maintenance must be undertaken by someone who is competent.
• Rule 12 — waste sludge must be safely disposed of by an authorised person.
• Rule 13 — on sale, the operator must give the new operator written notice that a small sewage discharge is being carried out, with a description of the waste water system and its maintenance requirements.
• Rule 14 — the system must be appropriately decommissioned when it stops being used, so that nothing polluting can reach groundwater, inland fresh waters or coastal waters.

Rules 1 to 14 bind every system whatever its age. A tank installed in 1975 is exempt from the British Standard and from nothing else.

Rules 15 to 21: discharges from 1 January 2015

• Rule 15 — discharges must not be within 30 metres of a public foul sewer.
• Rule 16 — the necessary planning and building control approvals for the treatment system must be in place.
• Rule 17 (surface water) — discharges must not be in or within 500 metres of a special area of conservation, special protection area, Ramsar site, biological SSSI, freshwater pearl mussel population, designated bathing water or protected shellfish water; within 200 metres of an aquatic local nature reserve; or within 50 metres of a chalk river or aquatic local wildlife site.
• Rule 18 (ground) — discharges must not be in, or within 50 metres of, a special area of conservation, special protection area, Ramsar site or biological SSSI, and must not be in ancient woodland.
• Rule 19 (surface water) — discharges must be made to a watercourse that normally has flow throughout the year.
• Rule 20 (surface water) — any partial drainage field must be installed within 10 metres of the bank side of the watercourse.
• Rule 21 (surface water) — discharges must not be made to an enclosed lake or pond.

Rules 22 and 23: new discharges from 2 October 2023

Both of the 2023 additions exist to stop small discharges accumulating into a large one. They bite hardest on hamlets, farm conversions and multi-plot developments, where four or five individually modest discharges arrive at the same ditch or the same field.

Rule 22 is the companion: a new discharge cannot share an outlet with another discharge if the combined volume would exceed the volumetric threshold for ground or surface water. Between them they mean your neighbours' systems are now part of your assessment rather than someone else's problem. The obvious objection is that there is no public register of exempt discharges. The Environment Agency's answer was that 50 metres is a short enough distance to resolve by asking the neighbouring properties.

Separation distances: how far from a house, a well or a watercourse?

The distances that govern a small sewage discharge come from three separate documents, which is why they are so often quoted incompletely. The General Binding Rules set the environmental setbacks. Approved Document H of the Building Regulations (the published guidance) and BS 6297 set the construction setbacks for a drainage field. The SR2025 standard rules permits set a third, wider set again. All of them are cumulative, so a drainage field has to clear every distance that applies at once, including the 10 metres to any watercourse or permeable drain, which on many plots means the existing surface water drain rather than a stream.

Two of those figures are routinely conflated and should not be. The 50-metre well distance is a General Binding Rule. The 125-metre version is a condition of the standard rules permits, set higher because those permits allow a larger discharge. The Environment Agency said so explicitly when it cut the figure from the 250 metres it had originally proposed.

A plot can pass on ground conditions and still fail on geometry. Every distance that applies has to be cleared at once, and the nearest constraint is rarely the binding one.

Groundwater source protection zone 1 is an absolute bar for a discharge to ground, and the designation is wider than most people expect: as well as the mapped zones, it captures any area within 50 metres of a private water supply for human consumption. Check the designation on the Magic map rather than assuming, and check it before the design rather than after. Where the question is whether the ground will take the effluent at all, that is a separate exercise in assessing the ground conditions before anything is sized.

Why a septic tank cannot discharge to a watercourse

A septic tank in England cannot discharge directly to surface water: a stream, river, ditch, canal or any other watercourse. The reasoning is mechanical rather than bureaucratic. A septic tank settles solids and provides primary treatment only; it does not treat effluent to a standard a watercourse can absorb. The rules require secondary treatment from a small sewage treatment plant for every surface water discharge, so a septic tank cannot meet them whatever date it was installed.

This is where the mythical 2020 deadline came from. Existing systems were given a transition period ending 1 January 2020, and trade commentary has been repeating that date ever since. It is no longer in the guidance. What the guidance says now is this:

A septic tank discharging to a ditch is non-compliant today. It makes no difference how long it has been doing it, or that nobody has ever complained.

The obligation is therefore continuous, not tied to a date that passed six years ago. It tends to surface at one of two moments: when something goes wrong and the Environment Agency looks at the system, or when the property is sold and a buyer's solicitor asks where the tank discharges. Where the receiving ditch is an ordinary watercourse, any works to the outfall itself are a separate consent again, covered by ordinary watercourse consent.

Your three options if your septic tank discharges to a watercourse

The Environment Agency sets out three ways back into compliance with the General Binding Rules: connect to the public foul sewer, replace the septic tank with a small sewage treatment plant, or divert the discharge to a drainage field so that it goes to ground instead. Which one is right depends almost entirely on the ground conditions and on how close the public sewer runs, and the order below is the one the Agency prefers.

1. Connect to the public foul sewer where one is reasonably accessible. This is the Agency's preferred option and the one worth ruling out first rather than last, since the 30-metre test may make it compulsory in any case.
2. Replace or upgrade the septic tank with a small sewage treatment plant certified to BS EN 12566-3, which treats effluent to a standard suitable for a watercourse.
3. Divert the discharge to a drainage field designed to BS 6297:2007+A1:2008 so that it goes to ground instead. This depends on ground conditions and needs infiltration testing before anything is designed.

Ruling out the sewer connection first is not politeness. The 30-metre test may make it compulsory whatever you would rather do.

Option three is the one that most often fails on site. Whether a drainage field will work at all is decided by a percolation test, and the result sizes the field. Unda's guide to BS 6297 infiltration testing for foul drainage fields covers the method and the acceptable range, and the drainage field size calculator turns a percolation value into a trench area. The test that governs a foul drainage field is not the same test as the BRE Digest 365 soakaway test used for surface water, and results are not transferable between them. That confusion sends more applications back for further information than any other single error in off-mains drainage.

What changed on 23 July 2026: engineered ground and drainage mounds

On 23 July 2026 the Environment Agency amended the guidance for discharges to ground to allow engineered ground and drainage mounds to meet the General Binding Rules. Until then, ground that percolated too fast pushed a scheme onto a permit. Now it does not, provided three conditions are met, and one of them will decide the answer on a great many rural sites.

Engineered ground and drainage mounds can now meet the rules outright, but not in a floodplain, and that is a flood risk question before it is a drainage one.

The floodplain exclusion is the condition to test first, because it is the one most likely to be assumed rather than checked. It is not answered by looking at the ground; it is answered by looking at the Flood Zone the discharge point sits in, and on a site partly in Flood Zone 2 or 3 the position of the mound within the site can decide whether the route is available at all. You can make a first check on Unda's flood risk map by postcode or the Environment Agency's own long-term flood risk service, though a planning application will want the designation confirmed properly, normally as part of a flood risk assessment.

The practical effect is that a site with ground too permeable for a conventional drainage field, the classic finding of a percolation value below 15 seconds per millimetre where effluent would reach groundwater insufficiently treated, now has an exempt route available where previously it had only a permit. Adding a sand layer to bring the engineered ground up to a minimum Vp of 15 is the method the Environment Agency names. The same relief applies to drainage mounds, on the same two conditions: not in a floodplain, and designed to BS 6297. It also means the foul drainage answer can now turn on a flood risk question, which is one more reason a scheme often needs both a flood risk assessment and a drainage strategy.

What changed in April 2026: the SR2025 standard rules permits

Until this year, a small sewage discharge that could not meet the General Binding Rules had one route open to it: a bespoke environmental permit, with a site-specific risk assessment and a four-month determination. On 20 April 2026 the Environment Agency published three standard rules permits, SR2025 No 5, No 6 and No 7, covering the three most common ways a domestic system falls just outside the rules.

A standard rules permit is determined in 20 working days. A bespoke permit takes around four months, and on most development programmes that difference decides whether foul drainage sits on the critical path.

All three share a common set of conditions, and several of them are stricter than the General Binding Rules they replace. The discharge cannot be within 125 metres of a well, spring or borehole used for drinking water or food production. The 30-metre public sewer arithmetic applies, with the domestic and non-domestic distances added together where a system serves both. The 50-metre separation from another discharge applies. Chemical dosing and electrocoagulation are prohibited outright. The system must be serviced at least once every 12 months by a competent and suitably qualified person, records kept for six years, and any pollution or breach confirmed in writing within 24 hours.

The permits came out of Standard Rules Consultation No 32, which ran from 1 October to 12 November 2025 and drew 13 responses. The Environment Agency moved on four points before publishing, and the summary of consultation responses records each:

• Potable water supplies — the screening distance came down from 250 metres to 125 metres, after respondents argued the original figure was impractical.
• Public foul sewers — the screening distance was linked to the number of properties served, following the same method as the General Binding Rules.
• Ammoniacal nitrogen — the limit for discharges to ground on principal or secondary A aquifers was relaxed from 5 to 10 milligrams per litre as N.
• Effluent testing — the requirement for an annual test of effluent quality was removed altogether.

One restriction on SR2025 No 7 is easy to miss, and it is the difference between a 20-day permit and a four-month one.

An existing discharge, for this purpose, means one that was in place and discharging to the same watercourse before 2 October 2023. Retrofitting treatment equipment to an old septic tank can therefore be regularised under SR2025 No 7; the same equipment cannot justify a brand-new discharge on a new plot.

When you still need a bespoke permit

The standard rules permits are exactly that: standard. You either meet every condition or you do not, and there is no scope to negotiate the rules themselves. A bespoke permit is still required wherever one of the following applies.

• Scale — the discharge is more than 5 cubic metres a day, to ground or to surface water.
• Groundwater sensitivity — the discharge point sits in a groundwater source protection zone 1, or within 125 metres of a well, spring or borehole used for domestic supply or food production.
• A sewer within reach — a public foul sewer falls inside the screening distance, which the Environment Agency will not look behind when determining a standard rules application.
• Protected sites — the discharge is in ancient woodland, or too close to a European site, Ramsar site, biological SSSI, nature reserve, bathing water or shellfish water.
• Clustering — the discharge point is within 50 metres of another exempt or permitted sewage effluent discharge.
• Non-standard equipment on a new discharge — the case SR2025 No 7 specifically excludes.

A bespoke application carries an environmental risk assessment of the effect on the receiving groundwater or watercourse, and the Environment Agency aims to determine it within four months. Members of the public have 20 working days to comment. Varying or cancelling a permit takes around three months and transferring one around two, which matters when a rural property changes hands.

On a development programme, four months is a long time to discover you needed a permit. The eligibility criteria for SR2025 No 5 are the cheapest place to find out that you do not.

Cesspools sit outside the General Binding Rules

A cesspool, sometimes called a cesspit, is a sealed tank that stores sewage and discharges nothing at all. Because the General Binding Rules govern discharges, and a cesspool makes none, it sits outside them completely. There is no volume limit to meet and no permit to hold unless the Environment Agency specifically tells you otherwise.

What there is instead is a tanker. A cesspool must be emptied by a registered waste carrier before it reaches capacity, and the Environment Agency's own illustration of the interval is monthly. That makes it comfortably the most expensive off-mains option to run, and the reason it is treated as a last resort under the Part H foul drainage hierarchy. A new cesspool must hold at least 18,000 litres for two users, plus a further 6,800 litres for each additional user, so the tank grows quickly with occupancy.

If you are weighing a cesspool against a treatment plant, emptying frequency usually settles the argument. The cesspool size and emptying calculator gives a first pass at both, and the full set of free drainage calculators covers the rest of the sizing.

A cesspool is outside the rules because it discharges nothing — not because it is a lighter-touch option.

Are septic tanks legal, and what happens if yours is not compliant?

Septic tanks are entirely legal in England, and nothing in the General Binding Rules bans them. What is not legal is a septic tank discharging directly to a watercourse, or any small sewage discharge that fails a rule that applies to it without holding a permit. The Environment Agency's position is unambiguous: operating without a permit when you need one is breaking the law.

In practice enforcement is rarely the trigger. Most non-compliant systems are discovered in one of three ways: a pollution incident or a complaint brings the Environment Agency to the site; a planning application requires the foul drainage route to be evidenced; or a sale puts the system in front of a buyer's solicitor. The first is uncommon, the second and third are routine, and on a site that also carries flood risk the same submission will need a flood risk assessment for planning alongside it.

• No permit where one is required — an offence, and the discharge must stop or be regularised.
• A septic tank discharging to a watercourse — non-compliant from the day the rules applied, with the work to be planned and done within a reasonable timescale, usually 12 months.
• A failed rule on an otherwise sound system — often fixable by moving the discharge point, upgrading the treatment, or applying for the standard rules permit that now covers the failure.
• A discharge through a well, borehole or post-2007 rainwater soakaway — cannot be permitted at all, and must be replaced.

The practical point is that almost every failure has a route back, and since April 2026 more of those routes are 20-working-day ones. What costs money is finding out late. Where a failing private system is contributing to a wider problem, the same catchment arithmetic shows up in sewer flooding and in dry weather flow data.

Almost every failure has a route back. Since April 2026 more of those routes take 20 working days rather than four months.

What those routes look like in practice varies with the site, and the project case studies show how the same set of rules resolves differently on clay, on chalk and beside a designated site.

Selling or buying a property with a septic tank

Rule 13 of the General Binding Rules places a specific duty at the point of sale. When a property served by a small sewage discharge changes hands, the seller must give the buyer written notice that a small sewage discharge is being carried out, together with a description of the system and what maintaining it involves. The Environment Agency's guidance sets out what that notice should contain.

• The system — a description of the treatment system and the drainage system.
• The location — where the main parts of the treatment system, the drainage system and the discharge point sit.
• Any changes — details of alterations made to either system.
• Maintenance — how both should be maintained, and the maintenance manual if there is one.
• Records — the maintenance records, if there are any.

Conveyancing has moved well beyond that minimum. A septic tank discharging to a watercourse is one of the more common reasons a rural sale stalls, because the buyer's side will want it resolved, or the price adjusted, before completion. Where the tank discharges to a watercourse the Environment Agency now expects the parties to agree who is responsible for the upgrade as a condition of sale rather than leaving it unresolved.

For most owners the trigger to put a non-compliant system right is not an inspection. It is the sale.

If you are selling, establish where the system actually discharges before the property goes on the market rather than during the search stage, when you have least room to negotiate. A buyer will usually be working from a CON29DW drainage and water search, which confirms whether the property is connected to a public sewer but will not tell either party whether an off-mains system complies. Nor will it settle who owns the pipework, which is a question of whether the run was ever adopted — the long story behind sewer adoption.

How the septic tank regulations apply to a planning application

For a new build, or any development that cannot connect to the mains, foul drainage has to be designed to meet the General Binding Rules from the outset, and the planning system expects to see that demonstrated. A drainage strategy that says "septic tank to soakaway" and stops there is the kind of thing that comes back as a request for further information, or as a condition you then discharge at your own cost.

What a validating officer, and later the lead local flood authority, want to see is a route through the rules that holds together end to end.

1. Show that connection to a public foul sewer is not reasonable, using the 30-metre test scaled to the number and type of properties served.
2. Fix the discharge type and the design volume from flows and loads, not from an assumption about bedroom numbers.
3. Prove the receiving environment can take it: infiltration testing for a drainage field, or evidence of year-round flow for a watercourse.
4. Demonstrate that the separation distances and protected-site setbacks are met at the actual discharge point, not at the tank.
5. State the regulatory route: exempt under the General Binding Rules, a named SR2025 standard rules permit, or a bespoke permit.

Getting that last step wrong is the expensive one. An application that assumes an exemption and then turns out to need a bespoke permit loses four months nobody budgeted for. Foul drainage sits alongside the surface water drainage strategy, which works down the SuDS hierarchy, in the same submission, and both are regular grounds for an LLFA objection or for an application being returned as invalid.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

The General Binding Rules apply in England only. Each of the other three nations regulates small sewage discharges separately, and a system a few hundred metres over a border can sit under a wholly different set of obligations.

• Scotland — the Scottish Environment Protection Agency regulates discharges under the Water Environment (Controlled Activities) Regulations, which operate a registration and authorisation system rather than the English general binding rules.
• Wales — Natural Resources Wales is the regulator, and the English guidance and the SR2025 standard rules permits do not extend across the border.
• Northern Ireland — the Northern Ireland Environment Agency administers consents to discharge under separate legislation.

A system a few hundred metres over a border sits under a wholly different regime. Nothing on this page applies outside England.

If a property sits in Wales, the foul drainage question forms part of the same submission as a flood consequence assessment rather than an English flood risk assessment, and the regulatory route has to be named against the Welsh regime.

Frequently asked questions

Unda prepares foul and surface water drainage strategies for planning applications across England. Where a scheme depends on a private sewage system, the work is to establish which of the 23 rules apply, whether the discharge is exempt or needs one of the SR2025 permits, and to set that out in a form a planning authority will accept. That is what a foul drainage strategy for planning does, and it is what makes the discharge of drainage planning conditions straightforward once permission is granted.