Examination of Witnesses(Questions 520-539)
MR ELLIOT
MORLEY MP, MR
DANIEL INSTONE
AND MR
STEPHEN REEVES
WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2002
Mr Wiggin
520. That is not strictly true for the Welsh
Environment Agency, is it?
(Mr Morley) The Welsh Environment Agency is also accountable
to the Welsh Assembly, which, of course, is part of the democratic
accountability.
521. So my county, which is in England, is not
then accountable to parliament. Herefordshire is in England but
comes under the Welsh Environment Agency.
(Mr Morley) Yes, that is a very interesting question.
(Mr Instone) Just to be clear, there is one Environment
Agency covering England and Wales, so in principle the accountability
from the Environment Agency is in relation to parliament here
through DEFRA on English matters and to the National Assembly
for Wales on Welsh matters.
(Mr Morley) That is right, but the ultimate accountability
is the Secretary of State for DEFRA.
Chairman
522. Would you let us have a note on this. Perhaps
it would be helpful. So we would like to know, where we have a
river basin management plan which crosses an internal border in
the UK, where the lines of accountability lie.
(Mr Morley) There is a complication where you do have
that cross-over on the Welsh border, and the reason for that,
as we know, is because it is a river basin management which falls
within the remit of the Welsh section of the Environment Agency.
There is a logic in that, but I must make it absolutely clear
that the Environment Agency as a body is an England and Wales
body and it is accountable to parliament through the Secretary
of State.
Chairman: What we are concerned about, obviously,
is how is this actually going to work in practice on a day-to-day
basis between the various actors who are going to be bound by
its mandate. That is why we are teasing away at this. I am sure
a note would be helpful.
Mr Jack
523. You just whizzed past an interesting phrase.
You said "We have set up a co-ordinating group." Who
within DEFRA is the lead person who is going to monitor what this
myriad of activity is getting up to? Is it Mr Reeves, for example?
Is he Mr Water Framework Directive in your Department?
(Mr Instone) I am Head of the Water Quality Division,
and I have been chairing the implementation group. I have also
been chairing the meetings we have had of our stakeholder forum
but as far as the internal implementation by government is concerned,
I have been chairing that process, with a very strong input from
Mr Reeves and his staff.
524. The reason I ask that question is, having
looked at the Commission's website on the Water Framework Directive,
it is a dazzling array of complexity, of groups meeting—for
example, I see here that at the Directors of Water Meeting a couple
of years ago, they set up a strategic co-ordination group, and
I look around and I discover that on topology classification of
transitional coastal waters one of the lead countries is the United
Kingdom. I want to know, given all the bodies who are involved
in this, who is going to sit there and make it their life's work
to ensure that this whole lot comes together, and where there
are problems, reports to ministers if there are difficulties in
all the ways that we are already teasing out. Who is going to
do that job?
(Mr Morley) We have a division in DEFRA which is our
Water Quality Division, and our officials who advise ministers,
who also, of course, co-ordinate with the Environment Agency,
who themselves are very much tasked with the implementation on
the ground. Within the UK there is a clear line of communication
and accountability about how this is going to work.
525. To come back to my very simple question,
who is Mr/Mrs/Ms Water Framework Directive? Who is the person?
Is it Mr Instone? Is he the man I should write to if I have a
problem, apart from you?
(Mr Morley) In all questions of accountability, you
should be writing to me.
526. Is Mr Instone the man?
(Mr Instone) If you leave aside the question of who
you should write to, and ministerial accountability, which obviously
rests with the minister, yes, it is one of our key functions—in
fact, the major single function—to ensure that our role
in implementing this Directive is correctly carried out and to
time.
527. How many people do you have working and
reporting to you, bringing you information about this? How big
is your resource to do this job?
(Mr Instone) The direct staff I have is a branch of
about five people, headed by Stephen Reeves, but we draw on other
people outside that branch, for example, our lawyers, our economists,
and of course, we are very heavily drawing on the experience and
skills not just of the Environment Agency but of other non-departmental
public bodies such as English Nature, who also have a role to
play here.
528. Put simply, and respecting the fact that
advice to ministers is not for public consumption, are you satisfied
that you have sufficient resources to ensure that all the deadlines,
milestones, organisational complexity, tasks, challenges, definitions
and every other part of this can be done on time at an affordable
price?
(Mr Instone) I think we are satisfied on that, yes.
Obviously, whatever level of resources one has, it is always nice
to have more, but the position is that we are satisfied that we
can do the job.
529. In administrative terms, Minister, what
do you estimate the cost is to the United Kingdom of implementing
this Directive? That is not the same question as "What is
the cost to the United Kingdom?"
(Mr Morley) I understand, and that is a very difficult
one to answer. We will try and pull some of this together for
you, but we will have to do that in some detail because, of course,
the implementation of administration, which I understand you are
talking about, does not just fall within the costs of DEFRA, because
of course there will be people in the Environment Agency working
on this, people in English Nature working on this, there is the
office of the regulator, for example, who are working on aspects
of this. So in terms of the implementation, the costs are spread
across a range of departments and agencies. There is also involvement
of NGOs. It is really quite complex in that sense, but we can
certainly give you an idea of the administrative costs from DEFRA
in relation to our direct costs.
Diana Organ
530. I want to go back to the letter that the
Chairman asked you for about the accountability on the borders.
There was a slightly glib response about the Environment Agency
covering England and Wales. That is not true of Scotland, and
river basins do not fit into the neat lines of administrative
areas on the map. What happens about the situation on the border
between England and Scotland with rivers that come across that
border? I wonder if you could include that in the letter, because
if we are having river basin management for the Directive, the
upper waters or whatever may be in Scotland, nobody is accountable
for them from the Environment Agency's point of view.
(Mr Morley) The English-Scottish border is not quite
as complicated as you think.
(Mr Reeves) There are two river basins across the
Scotland-England border, and in Wales there are also two river
basins, the Severn and the Dee. Therefore, our proposal, made
jointly with the National Assembly is, if you take the examples
of the Severn and Dee basins, that albeit river basin plans will
be drawn up for both of those basins covering the whole of the
basin, both the National Assembly and DEFRA are proposing that
the Environment Agency are the competent authority, so one body,
the Agency, has competent authority to draw up one plan for the
basins of the Severn and the Dee, and those basin plans will be
jointly approved by the National Assembly and the Secretary of
State. That is the proposed process.
531. As the Minister will know, I speak with
some feeling, representing an area that is bordered by the Severn
on one side and the Wye on the other, and if I have a problem
with water or fisheries I never know whether you go to the Welsh
Assembly or to the Minister or the Environment Agency. It makes
it very confusing for the citizens of that area as to who they
should go to with a complaint they have about the rivers.
(Mr Morley) I understand exactly the point you are
making. As you say, we have discussed a range of issues in the
Severn, but in this case it has been agreed, and there is one
agency who are taking the lead in the development of the plans,
and I think that is very clear.
Chairman: We would like a little note on that
in relation to the Anglo-Welsh border, the Anglo-Scottish border
and the border across the two parts of Ireland, with no doubt
references to decision trees, which I understand the Permanent
Secretary appears to be particularly attached to.
Mr Mitchell
532. We had some concern expressed by the Chemical
Industries Association last week about the conciliation process
between the Parliament and the Commission in which various last-minute
changes were introduced and decisions were taken which really
bore no relationship, they said, to either the overall interpretation
of the thing or to the cost implications of the changes. Let me
ask you about the conciliation process. Was the one on the Water
Framework Directive subject to an unusual degree of last-minute
haggling, or was it just a normal conciliation process?
(Mr Morley) I can honestly say I do not know all the
details of the conciliation process, because this is an issue
between the European Parliament and the Commission. It is always
the case, of course, that there are generally some changes to
directives as part of the conciliation process because the Parliament
sometimes press issues harder than the Commission, and there are
sometimes quite violent disagreements between the Parliament and
the Commission. I am not aware, however, whether there was any
greater percentage of this kind of discussion on this Directive
than on others.
533. Can you just tell us what happens in those
conciliation processes. I, rather charmingly, last week characterised
the Euro MPs as naive idealists or something like that, and they
are liable to be subject to all kinds of pressures on those ideals,
like being kind to animals and women and the environment and things
like that. What does the British Government do in this kind of
situation? Does it tell them "This is what we want out of
the Directive"? Does it say what the British view is or are
they just left to get on with the naive idealism as they please?
(Mr Morley) As you appreciate, Chairman, I cannot
speak for the European Parliament because that is not my accountability.
I can certainly explain our relationship with the European Parliament
and the Commission.
534. So we do not tell them anything?
(Mr Morley) Yes. In terms of British Euro MPs, they
are provided with a briefing through UKREP our permanent representation
in the European Parliament, which gives a briefing on the government
view on issues like this. So we are in contact with Euro MPs so
they know our concerns about various aspects of directives, and
of course, UKREP do talk to the Commission services and secretariat
in relation to what the Commission are proposing and again our
views, which are also influenced through the Council of Ministers
and the Environment Council. So we have a lot of input into the
process, but the actual decision-making process is of course part
of the mechanism of the European Parliament and its relationship
with the Commission.
535. But you do give them a starting point to
go astray from.
(Mr Morley) Yes, we do.
536. So what effect did the conciliation process
have on the Directive?
(Mr Morley) There were some changes.
(Mr Reeves) In summary, the main issues where the
Parliament were looking for changes were in relation to the OSPAR
Convention, where they wanted to incorporate the Convention into
the Directive, to make the Convention's aspirational targets part
of the legally binding objectives of the Directive. The Parliament
had concerns about the groundwater provisions in the common position
adopted by the Council and wanted to make them stronger. Finally,
the Parliament wished to qualify the way objectives were framed
in the Directive so that where there was provision for the use
of derogations, further steps had to be followed before those
derogations could be used, so some explicit steps were added into
the Directive before derogations were used. So OSPAR Convention,
groundwater and use of derogations were perhaps the main areas.
537. Were extra cost obligations imposed on
the industry at that stage which the Commission had not envisaged
in the first place?
(Mr Reeves) These were the Parliament's proposals,
so they were not part of the Commission's original proposal and
they were not part of the common position, so in that sense they
were new factors in the negotiation.
Chairman
538. This is crucial, is it not? The final conciliation
process is between the Parliament, which may well be represented
by its President and the leading members of the Committee concerned,
and the presidency, so that the other Council members are not
present at the conciliation process. There might be a past or
a future President as well but it is a derogation, and it is a
bit of a zero sum game, because if there is not an agreement reached,
then the whole project might well fall. Does the President come
back after that conciliation procedure and say, "Look, if
we want this Directive, we are going to have to accept those.
This is what I have agreed with the President"? Do you get
a chance to look at it at that point, and where you have doubts
as to whether or not part of that agreement may actually make
a lot of sense, for example, a scientific target which people
say is meaningless, are you able to put riders in which say "Subject
to being able to work this out in detail" or "Subject
to this being provable or demonstrable"? How categoric is
that final agreement?
(Mr Morley) I think there is a possibility of changing
perhaps the detail, if not the substance, within the Council of
Ministers in relation to the final agreement that is made, clarification
of how things work. I think that is possible, Chairman.
539. The Chemical Industries Association did
tell us a couple of things in it were quite literally unachievable,
quite categorically unachievable.
(Mr Morley) I would have to look at what those particular
points were.
(Mr Instone) From my understanding of what the Chemical
Industry said, they were particularly concerned about the targets
or the objectives for mercury.
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