Asked by: James Paice (Conservative - South East Cambridgeshire)
Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what guidance he has provided to planning authorities on the relevance of amplitude modulation in applications for land-based wind turbines in advance of the review of evidence on wind turbine amplitude modulation his Department is appointing acoustics experts to conduct.
Answered by Matt Hancock
DECC officials intend to issue an invitation to tender shortly, in order to appoint acoustics experts to review the evidence on wind turbine amplitude modulation (AM) with a view to providing advice on how appropriate AM thresholds might be set in planning conditions.
Asked by: James Paice (Conservative - South East Cambridgeshire)
Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what steps he is taking to bring the ETSU-R-97 assessment methodology for calculating the noise impact of wind turbine generators in line with current World Health Organisation guidelines.
Answered by Amber Rudd
The Government takes seriously the impact of noise from wind turbines. Potential noise impacts are considered within the planning process in accordance with ETSU-R-97, and taking into account any guidance on good or best practice that the Government has published or endorsed, before any decision is taken whether or not to grant consent to a project. The Government believes that wind farms built in accordance with current guidance should not have significant impacts on those living or working within the vicinity of these sites, and has no plans to revise ETSU-R-97.
Asked by: James Paice (Conservative - South East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of audit trails in local government expenditure spending; and what estimate he has made of the incidence of accidental duplicate payments to local government suppliers in each of the last five years.
Answered by Kris Hopkins
Whilst we do not centrally hold detailed information on local authorities’ duplicate payments, in my Department's publication “50 ways to save”, we observed that councils could save money by conducting audits of potential duplicate payments and reforming accounts payable processes.
This was based on research by Experian of both local and central government bodies, suggesting duplicate payments could cost taxpayers up to £147 million a year.
As stated in my answer of 3 September 2014, Official Report, Column 265W, my own Department has put this best practice into action and delivered savings of £100,000 by recovering duplicate payments made since 2006.