Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2018

Lord Jones Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)]

My Lords, I am pleased to introduce these regulations. Air pollution is the biggest environmental risk to public health in the UK. Air quality overall has improved significantly in recent decades. Emissions have decreased across each of the five key air pollutants—sulphur dioxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and ammonia. We need to ensure that these improvements continue through concerted action by government and local authorities in collaboration with others.

In some parts of our country there are unacceptable levels of air pollution. The Government are committed to tackling this and improving air quality, and are working to make sure that concentrations of nitrogen dioxide come within statutory limits. We are also looking to reduce total emissions of air pollution through legally binding targets for 2020 and 2030. On a local level, authorities across the country are developing local plans to tackle air pollution. The measures they bring forward—including, potentially, clean air zones—will include encouraging the replacement of old, polluting vehicles with modern, cleaner technologies. It is also important that we look to encourage the replacement of the most polluting forms of energy production.

The regulations before your Lordships relate to medium combustion plants and generators. These are a largely unregulated, significant source of emissions of air pollutants. For example, emissions of nitrogen oxides from diesel generators are on average more than six times higher than emissions from gas engines.

These regulations will implement the medium combustion plant directive, in adherence to our membership of the EU. Emissions from small-scale, highly polluting generators have also caused concern. The Government are looking to take robust action to tackle this source of emissions by introducing further domestic measures that impose additional emission controls on these generators.

These regulations are highlighted in the 25-year environment plan, launched earlier this month. They will encourage a shift to cleaner technologies and will assist in meeting the requirements of the ambient air quality directive and the revised national emission ceilings directive. Subject to your Lordships’ consent, they will make a valuable contribution to improving air quality, thereby protecting human health and the environment.

Emissions from plants over 50 thermal megawatts are already regulated under the industrial emissions directive. These regulations bring into scope medium combustion plants, which are in the 1 to 50 thermal megawatt range and are used to generate heat for large buildings such as offices, hotels, hospitals and prisons. They are also used in industrial processes, as well as for power generation. Implementing the medium combustion plant directive, commonly referred to as the MCPD, will help to reduce air pollution by introducing emission controls for these combustion plants.

As well as transposing the requirements of the MCPD, these regulations will impose new domestic requirements on the operators of low-cost, small-scale flexible power generators. There has been a rapid growth in the use of this type of generator in this country in the last few years. The recent growth of mainly diesel generators is a cause for concern. These generators emit high levels of pollutants such as nitrogen oxides compared to other medium combustion plants, and they are not currently subject to emission controls. This growth has a negative impact on local air quality as well as on our ability to meet future emission reduction targets on a national scale.

The MCPD requirements are not sufficient in themselves to tackle emissions from the increased use of these generators. The proposed regulations will subject generators to permitting and a nitrogen oxides emission limit. As a result, the regulations will ensure that diesel generators reduce their emissions to the same level as gas generators.

These regulations will provide an estimated 43% of the sulphur dioxide emissions reduction, 9% of the reduction for particulate matter and 22% of the nitrogen oxides emissions reduction needed to meet our 2030 targets. They are supported by organisations including the British Heart Foundation, the British Lung Foundation and the Royal College of Physicians. The regulations will encourage the use of cleaner plants and generators and will require those which pollute more to have technology fitted to bring their emissions within the specified limits.

Clean air is one of the most basic requirements of a healthy environment for us all to live, work, and bring up families. Clearly there is a strong case for action and we have a clear ambition and policy agenda to achieve this. These regulations will make a real impact and are a further demonstration of our commitment to improve air quality in this country. I beg to move.

[Lord Jones (Lab)]

My Lords, as ever, the Minister has made helpful and succinct introductory remarks to this statutory instrument, for which I thank him. Can he confirm that recently there have been changes at the top of the natural resources body for Wales? Is there a new director and a new chair? Are there any details he can give, either now or at a later date, about the principles of the chair and the director of that body in Wales? What is the extent of the contact and co-operation between the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales, bearing in mind that we now have devolved government operating in Cardiff? Can he say what his department’s experience is of dealing with our Government in Cardiff?

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his helpful and constructive introduction to these regulations. As has been said, they bring into line medium combustion generators with larger ones. However, in applying these regulations to 1 to 50 megawatt generators, it has to be said that 50 megawatts would be capable of powering up to 8,000 homes. That is not a small undertaking and is therefore, quite rightly, worthy of regulation. This size is typical of the generators used, as the noble Lord has said, for a range of purposes including electricity generation, domestic and residential heating and cooling, providing heat and steam for industrial processes and so on. Generators of this capacity are inherently diesel or gas powered, and these regulations bring diesel down to the level of gas-powered generators.

The Government are rightly attempting to reduce the level of emissions in this country. Poor air quality is the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK. However, they are presently 10 years late in meeting air quality standards. Public health is at risk and there is no time to lose if the NHS is not to be overburdened with patients with respiratory problems. Government estimates show that in 2008, the number of deaths attributable to fine particulate matter—that is, poor air quality—was 29,000. In 2016, the Royal College of Physicians estimated that the cost of the health impacts of air pollution to the UK was £20 billion.

There are approximately 143,000 medium combustion plants in the European Union, with an estimated 30,000 in the UK. The increase in the use of such generators has been identified as a source of avoidable increases in national emissions. Many generator farms have been set up solely to sell electricity back to the national grid. While this is very enterprising, it is having an effect on the nation’s health. The National Audit Office identified in 2017 that the Government will not achieve compliance with EU limits on nitrogen dioxide until 2021, some 11 years later than the deadline of 2010. In 2016, more than 85% of air quality zones in the UK, 37 out of 43, did not meet EU nitrogen dioxide limits and government estimates show that all 43 air quality zones will not be compliant with the limits until 2026. The measures being taken today are a step in the right direction, but there is still much more to do, and faster.

While I am happy with agreeing to the regulations, I would like to raise a point about flooding. In paragraphs 7.9 and 7.10 of the Explanatory Memorandum, the regulations indicate that the Environment Agency can use enforcement undertakings for a number of activities. In those areas of the country prone to continual flooding, such as the Somerset Levels, householders and businesses are often flooded to varying degrees of depth. Many have standby generators to pump water out of their premises when levels do not subside in an acceptable timescale, and often much larger generators have to be brought in to ease widespread flooding. Will the Minister give a reassurance that in such cases, enforcement action would not be taken if the generator in use did not comply with the regulations we are approving today?

I fully support the move to improve air quality as indicated in the air quality strategy and agree that tackling the most polluting generators must come into line first. However, an FOI request in October 2017 revealed that the Government had spent £370,000 in unsuccessfully challenging two court claims that their plans to tackle air pollution were “illegally poor”. Was this a wise use of money and could it not have been better spent on tackling air pollution itself? It is important to ensure that enforcement powers not only continue to remain available to tackle pollutants, but that the culture shift we are beginning to see in government from defending flawed environmental policy to enabling and adequately funding the means to safeguard air quality moves ahead at a much faster pace. These regulations are a welcome step in the right direction and I support them.