View from Strasbourg, 18 March
Strasbourg report, 18 March 2009
I believe that legislation should be judged not merely by its intentions, but by its results. Indeed, good intentions can sometimes do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding. An excellent example of this has been the European Commission’s directive on Industrial Emissions Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) which we voted on last week in Strasbourg. The IPPC legislation will merge seven existing directives on industrial pollution into one whilst extending the scope of the law. The directive creates a permit system to prevent and limit pollution from supposedly large-scale industrial installations. Yet a directive that was originally targeted at reducing industrial emissions instead threatened not only to force hospitals to shut down their boilers, but also to have a profound impact upon the Eastern Region’s agricultural sector.
Firstly, with regard to the NHS, concerns were raised that the new directive would result in around 70 hospitals across the country being forced to pay oppressive costs for their boilers. Hospitals require significant amounts of spare boiler capacity to cope with emergencies in case of technical failures. The IPPC directive would have assessed their boilers in light of their potential emissions as opposed to their actual emissions, incurring the NHS, and thus the British taxpayer substantial costs. The outcome of this was potentially catastrophic.
The British Conservatives submitted an amendment that that was passed by 471 votes to 169 that will allow such boilers to be subject to emission controls based solely on the amount of time they run rather than on notional full time running. This will save the NHS large amounts of money that can be much better spent on patient care rather than appeasing Brussels bureaucrats. It was a triumph for fairness and commonsense led by Conservative MEPs.
The IPPC was also a threat to smaller poultry farms. The Commission proposed applying the directive’s pollution controls to premises “with 40,000 places for broilers, or places for laying hens or 24,000 places for ducks or 11,500 places for turkeys”. The amendments replace this with the words “40,000 places for poultry”. The British National Farmers Union expressed concerns that this “will not benefit the EU poultry industry, consumers or the environment…Disproportionately stringent requirements will not bring added-value to the protection of the environment in the EU and have no scientific basis.”
I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. This legislation would have burdened a vitally important regional sector without tangible environmental benefit; all that it would have served to do was to tangle smaller poultry units in unnecessary red tape and added to their costs. Yet unfortunately, despite our best efforts we were not as successful when it came to the pig sector. An amendment we proposed to alter the manner in which (and forgive me for getting technical here) nitrogen excretion equivalent rates is calculated was not adopted – potentially adding £25,000 to the costs of a permit for pig farmers.
*Elsewhere sea passengers will be better protected and European waters made safer after MEPs adopted the EU’s third maritime package. Passengers will benefit from a new pan-European level of accident liability and insurance which means ship operators are liable for lost or damaged luggage and any physical harm caused by neglect. Previously liability has been set at different, and often insufficient, levels in member states according to their own national laws. I am delighted that passengers will be receiving greater protection when travelling by sea, a victory that has been achieved without burdening ferry companies with bureaucracy and red tape. This legislation now means that foreign ships entering EU ports are required to meet the same standards as our ships and face fines should they repeatedly fail to do so.
