Draft Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2016

Neil Parish Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2016 General Committees

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rory Stewart)]

I beg to move,

That the committee has considered the draft Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2016.

The regulations are designed to simplify the permitting process and make more straightforward the way in which we deal with works in rivers. Previously, the process was governed by complicated legislation from the 1970s and 1990s that ensured that a bespoke permit requiring a detailed application and assessment was needed for anything that happened in relation to a river, whether that concerned bridges, culverts, outflow pipes or work on banks.

The new system is an attempt to move to a more straightforward procedure whereby in the highest-risk cases—around half of cases—a bespoke permit is still required, but for others there is a simplified process. For some excluded categories, there will be no need for anything at all. Simple, straightforward works, such as putting a ladder or piece of scaffolding in the river temporarily, will not require any form of permit.

The second type of procedure is an exempt procedure, for which all that is necessary is for someone to register the works.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

I am interested in the ideas that my hon. Friend the Minister is putting forward. Will the regulations make it easier or more difficult to get a permit if, for example, there was local management of a river and we wanted to do a little dredging here and there?

[Rory Stewart]

Provided that the dredging work being undertaken was in the category for a registered exemption, all someone would have to do for works under 1.5 km is register that they were doing them and ensure that they had fulfilled the conditions of the exemption. They would then be able to proceed with the work. In the past, they would have had to make a bespoke application with a lot of detailed plans and drawings that would be considered on a case-by-case basis. We believe, though, that in low-risk cases of agricultural dredging that are not in areas of special scientific interest, it should be possible for people to fulfil a simple registration, follow the conditions and proceed. An example would be regular winter dredging.

There are essentially four different categories. The first, which I touched on briefly, is the excluded category, for which no permit at all is needed. For the second—the exempt category—people simply register online.

The third category is the standard rule permit, which requires people to seek permission—it is not just registration—and they have to follow standard conditions. For example, if someone is running an electric cable across the river, the conditions relate to putting it 1 metre or 1.5 metres under the river bed, starting around 8 metres from the edge of the river. There is, though, still a requirement for the agency—in this case the Environment Agency—to check the plans and drawings to ensure that the person has complied.

The final category is where the bespoke permits remain in place, but they are reduced to around half of cases.