Environmental services company EnTrade has appointed Natural England's Guy Thompson as its new Managing Director.

Set up by Wessex Water in 2016, EnTrade was last week named in the government's 25 Year Environment Plan as a "more efficient way of tackling pollution" and is currently addressing issues of water quality.

EnTrade allows buyers and sellers of environmental improvements to create a market for those improvements - such as encouraging farmers to grow cover crops on their land to help reduce the amount of nitrates reaching rivers.

Currently Chief Operating Officer at Natural England, which has collaborated with Wessex Water to understand the learning from EnTrade, Guy Thompson will join the company on 19 February and will build on the fifth round of auctions which have just got underway.

David Elliott, Director of Strategy and New Markets at Wessex Water, said:

 "We are really proud of what EnTrade has achieved in such a short time, and we have an ambition to grow the service to facilitate wider environmental improvement by enabling greater collaboration.”

Wessex Water has been working with farmers since 2016 to reduce nutrient loadings in the Poole harbour catchment in Dorset.

Farmers have also been bidding for the cost of growing cover crops in an EnTrade auction run in partnership with United Utilities.

EnTrade was set up initially to trial creating a marketplace to fund cover crops and other measures such as undersowing maize, installing buffer strips and converting areas to medium-term arable reversion in Poole.

It is now expanding into wider services and delivery such as phosphorus and biodiversity, while the online platform has been updated and made even easier to use.

The EnTrade online platform allows buyers and sellers of environmental improvements to come together to find the most cost-effective solution to an outcome.

Buyers of improvements can create an online reverse auction, into which sellers can bid their measures. EnTrade calculates the estimated impact of the measure and ranks bidders in the auction based on the efficiency of their measure.

Digital mapping and an easy-to-use interface means users can easily see whether their measures are eligible.

EnTrade is the reverse of a normal auction, with farmers bidding the price they are willing to be paid to implement the measures which typically drop during an auction as supply outstrips demand.