§ Baroness Byfordasked Her Majesty's Government:
Why the Environment Agency propose to charge pig and poultry farmers for implementing the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive, when there is no such requirement under the directive [HL1123]
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Lord Whitty)In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, charging is a matter for each member state. The Environment Act 1995 requires the Environment Agency to recover the full cost of its regulatory activities.
§ Baroness Byfordasked Her Majesty's Government:
Why they propose to introduce charges for pig and poultry farmers for implementing the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive, when the directive is not due to come into force across the European Union until 2007. [HL1124]
§ Lord WhittyThe directive had effect from October 1999, and new or substantially changed installations will require an IPPC permit immediately; we expect there to be few, if any, such installations in the pig and poultry sectors. Under the regulations we propose to make later this session existing installations will be phased into IPPC on a sectoral basis until 2007 in order to spread the workload of the regulators. The poultry and pig sectors are due to be phased into IPPC in 2003 and 2004 respectively. The order of phase-in is guided by the production by the European Commission of the BAT reference documents on which UK guidance on standards will be based.