Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2009

The Environmental Permitting Programme is a joint better-regulation initiative by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Environment Agency. The programme is designed to reduce or minimise the administrative burdens of regulation on operator and regulator. The Government felt that the management of extracted waste was principally a matter for environmental protection controls, for which the EPP provides the most appropriate and cost-effective regulatory regime. Twenty-eight out of 38 consultees also agreed that the EPP was the best means of transposing the MWD. The process is not making the law more complicated; on the contrary, the transposition of the MWD through the environmental permitting regulations avoids the creation of a new set of permitting regulations, as it produces an extended system that is more streamlined and simpler than two separate permitting systems. This process is in line with the Government’s commitment to better regulation and the cutting of administrative burdens. On the opencast mining issue, the directive is about mining waste rather than mining per se, so it controls the waste from coal extraction rather than coal mining itself. It is therefore a perfectly satisfactory process for all forms of mining, including opencast. Why did we take so long? There are several reasons for our failure to transpose by the due date, the most important of which is the Government’s commitment to full and effective consultation with industry on the options for transposing the directive and ensuring that it is transposed without gold-plating, and taking full advantage of available derogations. Having gone through the detail, I assure noble Lords that both of those objectives have been achieved. I take slight exception to the moan about how this Government put EU directions into law. When we get directives, we work hard to transpose them into UK law in a way that will work in the UK. Some countries perhaps take a simpler read-across and write-across approach, but this is a classic example of where we have spent time working with an industry in order to minimise a directive’s impact, using this vehicle in particular to merge the directives with systems and regulations with which the industry in question is familiar. The key aim of the directive is to prevent environmental pollution and harm to human health and safety, which are areas that the Environment Agency is already responsible for in other industry sectors. Because of its existing statutory role for managing environmental matters, the agency has extensive experience of mining and quarrying issues. The Government therefore believe that the same approach should be taken with mining waste. That approach will also ensure that additional burdens are not placed on the planning system, in line with the Government’s broader objective of a simpler, faster and more efficient planning system. The option preferred by the minerals industry, of the EPP being delivered by mineral planning authorities, would simply have added further burdens on mineral planners by requiring them to manage land issues through the planning system and environmental controls through EPP. On a personal note, I claimed once in a speech that over the course of my career I had probably been one of the most regulated people, having started in aviation, gone through railways and ended up looking after the waste sites of the UKAEA. I have some familiarity with the process of regulation and, frankly, you need two things from your regulator. The first is simplicity; ideally, there will be a single body to talk to, and that is exactly what this does. You do not want multiple bodies. When I was at the UKAEA, multiple bodies competed with each other and you would end up with regulations which were simply not capable of execution because the different bodies had overlapped in the demands that they put on them. You would then have to spend time negotiating with those bodies to make the regulations capable of execution. I am pro regulation—not pro bad regulation but pro good regulation—and good regulation is proportionate; it is about applying a proportionate response to a perceived risk. My experience with the Environment Agency was that it was particularly skilled at taking a proportionate approach, including when addressing severe historic pollution problems. I believe that the regime the Environment Agency is proposing is the right regime and I fully support it. I am pleased that, in principle, both opposition parties will support the regulations.