Environmental Impact Assessment (Agriculture) (England) Regulations 2006

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, on bringing this matter to the Grand Committee and thank her for it. It is a complicated set of regulations, which, quite apart from the administrative difficulties involved in getting them right, merit a certain degree of scrutiny. Far too many substantial and complex items of secondary legislation go though nowadays without being scrutinised, so it is good that we are able scrutinise this one. In general, this is a sensible transposition of some parts of the environmental impact assessment directive and the habitats directive. It is unfortunate that the computer programmes, be they Defra’s or those of the Stationery Office, could not get it right. The noble Baroness had her five minutes of fun going through the problems that have arisen and I do not want to repeat what she said.