Countryside ponds, part of Britain's natural heritage and home to fish, frogs, insects and freshwater plants, are continuing to be lost to development, drainage, intensive farming and neglect.
But Robert Atkins, the Environment Minister, yesterday dismissed calls for stronger protection for ponds, preferring to wait for a further survey in two years' time.
He said that there were signs that the decline was beginning to be reversed under agricultural reforms and that more new ponds are being created than are destroyed.
The new survey, carried out for the Department of the Environment by the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology and published yesterday, shows that the number of ponds and lakes fell by between 4 and 11.5 per cent between 1984 and 1990.
When the figures are adjusted for the drought of 1990, which hit southeast and eastern England and caused many ponds to dry up or be heavily tapped for irrigation, losses are up to 9 per cent.
The Inland Water Bodies survey indicates that there are between 332,000 and 315,000 ponds and lakes in Britain, down from 346,000 in 1984. Britain is unlikely to have lost any lakes so the figures reflect pond losses.
The survey follows studies showing that since 1945 Britain has lost nearly 40 per cent of its ponds.
The Council for the Protection of Rural England and Pond Action, an independent freshwater research group at Oxford Brookes University, estimate that since the late 1800s a million ponds have been lost. Their research indicates that many ponds are lost through neglect, as well as development and farming.
The new survey has looked at countryside ponds including tarns in the North of England and lochans in Scotland. It does not not include industrial, garden or city ponds.
Lilli Matson, assistant secretary at the Council for the Protection of Rural England, said the findings underscored the continuing threat to ponds and the wildlife which depend on them - including the rare glutinous snail and the star fruit freshwater plant.
The council and Pond Action have called for the introduction of pond preservation orders similar to tree preservation orders to protect them from development, intensive agriculture and neglect.
At the moment only ponds in sites of special scientific interest areas and historic ones scheduled as ancient monuments have any legal status.
But Mr Atkins said countryside schemes, including the Countryside Stewardship and Environmentally Sensitive Areas schemes where farmers are paid to manage the land in more environmentally friendly ways, needed to be given a chance.
"Conservation advice to land managers has also expanded and they are now much more aware of the importance of ponds to their land and to the environment," he said. "Detailed research is needed to verify more recent trends and identify more accurately the reasons behind changes in pond numbers. The Government intends to carry out a further national survey of ponds in 1996╔ In the meantime the Government sees no merit in introducing any further statutory protection for ponds," Mr Atkins said.
But the CPRE believes the minister's optimism is misplaced.
Studies, also published yesterday by the CPRE, claim that of the ú1.1 billion being spent on farming subsidies, only ú27 million is being spent on "green farming" of the kind likely to benefit not only ponds but farmland birds, hares, other wildlife and rural features including hedgerows and dry stone walls.
Paul Wynne, agriculture campaigner at the CPRE, said yesterday that the Government planned to increase its spending on green farming to ú100 million by 1996. But, he said, this was a drop in the ocean with few farmers getting the incentives needed to manage positively their land for its landscape and wildlife.
