As one Defra agency appears to be finally learning the painful lessons of IT rollouts gone wrong, another seems to have walked into the same trap. Tories adopt carrot approach to the environment
THE Conservative Party has decided the carrot of reward rather than the stick of regulation will best encourage farmers to protect the environment and its natural resources.
In a speech to the sustainable development experts E3G in Brussels yesterday (Tuesday, September 29), Nick Herbert, Shadow Environment Minister, said the world population was living way beyond its environmental means but called for a ‘philosophical shift’ in the methods needed to stop the rot.
He said policy makers should use incentives to encourage farmers to protect the environment rather than loading them with regulation which constrained them.
The EU nitrates directive was one area where incentives could make a real difference, he said.
“Instead of building ever-more works to remove nitrates from our waterways, it may be more cost-effective for everyone if a system of incentives could be found to remunerate farmers for using less fertiliser in areas which are likely to have a high impact on our water,” he said.
Some regulation was necessary, said Mr Herbert, but he argued every new rule should be subject to an obligatory impact assessment to strip it down to its bare minimum.
New rules often fall short ‘because of a failure to cost the consequences against the proposed benefits’, he said, citing the new EU pesticides regulation.
The regulation, agreed last week, is set to remove crop protection products from the market based on their hazardous properties rather than any real-life risk analysis.
“There was no European impact assessment carried out on the impact of the cut off-criteria, while member state impact assessments, including the British one, condemned the regulation as ‘disproportionate’,” he said.
“In future, it should be a cardinal rule of EU regulation that proper assessments are made of the costs they will impose in the real world far in advance of their implementation,” he said.
Mr Herbert also criticised government ministers for leaving the ‘cut and thrust’ of European debate to officials and then ‘gold-plating’ the subsequent regulation.
During ‘vital discussions’ about the electronic sheep tagging regulations, he said the relevant British Minister was absent.
“They missed three consecutive council meetings, even though British government trials of the system ‘indicated that the costs outweighed the benefits’,” said Mr Herbert.
