Parliamentary Bureau Motion
The next item of business is consideration of a Parliamentary Bureau motion. I ask Margaret Curran to move motion S2M-2889, on the approval of a Scottish statutory instrument.
Motion moved,
That the Parliament agrees that the draft Water Environment (Controlled Activities) (Scotland) Regulations 2005 be approved.—[Ms Margaret Curran.]
I wish to speak against the motion that the Parliament agrees that the draft Water Environment (Controlled Activities) (Scotland) Regulations 2005 be approved.
Time and again we hear pledges from ministers who say that they wish to cut red tape and not to impose needless costs on Scottish businesses. However, as became apparent at last week's meeting of the Environment and Rural Development Committee, at which we discussed the SSI, the regulations will do exactly what ministers keep telling us that they are trying to avoid doing.
On the face of it, the regulations should be welcomed, because they seek to protect Scotland's water environment. However, high-volume users of water in Scotland, such as the whisky industry, the hydropower companies and other sectors, are up in arms about the regulations, because of the new onslaught of red tape through the introduction of a costly and unjustifiable licensing regime. High-volume users in Scotland do not necessarily damage our water environments, yet the point at which the costly licensing regime will kick in will be determined by the volume of water used by the companies concerned, not environmental risk. Even the Deputy Minister for Environment and Rural Development, who attended the committee's meeting, accepted that high-volume users do not necessarily pose an environmental risk to our water environments. The purely arbitrary threshold of using 50m3 of water from any one abstraction will determine when the measure kicks in.
Does Richard Lochhead agree that it became clear after last week's discussion that there had been a failure in the consultation process? Does he also agree that there is adequate time to allow this worthy piece of legislation to be consulted on further before we have to face a vote in the chamber?
Alex Johnstone makes a valid point. The minister admitted to the committee that, if we agree to the regulations today, a licensing regime will be imposed on high-volume water users, such as the whisky industry, which is responsible for 40,000 jobs across Scotland, before there is any assessment of the environmental risk. He told the committee that if, thereafter, an environmental risk assessment finds that the use of such high volumes of water poses no risk to the environment, the conditions of the licence can be relaxed, but surely the process should be the other way around—surely we should assess environmental risk before applying the licensing regime.
The situation is illogical. If we approve the regulations, they will inflict unnecessary and costly red tape on the whisky industry and other sectors. Whisky distillers will be hit particularly hard, but they have used the same water sources for hundreds of years and they return the vast bulk of the water back to the rivers that they got it from in virtually the same condition as it was in when they took it.
By refusing to agree to the regulations today, we will provide the Environment and Rural Development Committee and the Parliament with the opportunity for further legislative scrutiny. The committee was presented with the regulations on 25 May and we were told that we had to accept them by 30 May. There was no time for proper legislative scrutiny, which is an important role for the Parliament and its committees. I urge the Parliament to reject the motion.
The Parliament approved the Water Environment and Water Services (Scotland) Act 2003 two years ago. Last week, as Mr Lochhead said, the Environment and Rural Development Committee considered in some detail the latest annual report on the implementation of the legislation, as well as the Water Environment (Controlled Activities) (Scotland) Regulations 2005, which are required to bring the act's provisions into force. The point of the act is to control, in line with the European water framework directive, a whole range of activities that may impact on the water environment; the point of the regulations is to put those controls in place.
We asked the Scottish Environment Protection Agency to assess levels of risk to our inland and coastal waters. Its analysis has shown that about 45 per cent of our waters are affected by pollution, abstraction or engineering works. The regulations will allow us to address those impacts and to protect the water environment and the quality of our water, which is precisely what is vital to the whisky industry, the bottled water industry and many other Scottish industries. The measures are proportionate, targeted and risk based.
Let me enlighten the chamber as to some of the figures. Approximately 145,000 activities impact on our water environment. Of those, about 50,000 will require only to conform to general binding rules. There will be no need to register or apply for a licence; there will simply be a need to conform to rules that are in the public domain. A further 80,000 activities will require only to be registered with SEPA—on the off-chance that there may be a cumulative impact—in order for them to go ahead.
That leaves about 15,000 activities of such a scale or effect that they will require a licence from SEPA, which is only about 10 per cent of the total number of activities. SEPA must carry out a risk assessment of the activities that are most likely to pose a serious threat in order to determine the appropriate tier of control. The point of having a volume-based threshold is to allow a full risk assessment to be triggered to establish what level of control will be appropriate in the longer term. If the assessment finds that there is no significant impact, there will be no need for significant regulatory control.
Does the minister accept that there is roughly a year before the provisions have to be on the statute book? That means that there is plenty of time to withdraw the regulations, have proper parliamentary scrutiny of the proposals and ensure that we do not pass regulations that will hit vital Scottish industries.
Mr Lochhead may feel that we have not had proper parliamentary scrutiny, but I assure him that, following the two-hour debate last week, I take a different view. It is worth noting that his proposal to the Environment and Rural Development Committee that we delay and fail to implement the regulations straight away was roundly rejected when committee members heard the evidence and understood the issues at stake.
SEPA needs to know about the scale of abstraction and its impact on the environment in order to make a judgment. We will ensure that SEPA considers borderline cases—those cases in which the scale of impact by volume may not be reflected at an early stage in the risk assessment process. That means that controls on some activities may be reduced so that a licence is no longer required. We will ensure that charges are reduced accordingly when it is found that a licence is no longer required; we will also ensure that rebates are provided when that is appropriate.
Ministers, not SEPA, will make the judgments on cost-effectiveness. We will continue to engage directly with the whisky industry and all other stakeholders. We will also report back to the Environment and Rural Development Committee as the regime is rolled out.