18/06/2016
The picture of a rural Yorkshire above illustrates part of my patch, for which I was responsible as a recently qualified environmental health officer back in 1974 â a year after we had joined the EEC.
What you see is Marsden Gate, overlooking the village of Stainland (in the mid-distance), above Elland in West Yorkshire. It was (and is) part of Calderdale with the district capital of Halifax. In many ways it was idyllic and I recall some of the happiest times of my life in what was an interesting and challenging job.
One of my tasks related to the house to the left of the picture. It was being damaged by a quarry below the crest of the hill, just out of sight. To the consternation of this and other house owners in the locality, the quarry-owner's use of explosives was causing serious structural damage to about 20 properties including, bizarrely, the quarry owner's own house.
I will not trouble you with the detail. Suffice to say that the vibration caused by the explosions is legally classified as "noise" â the definition of noise including "vibration". As such, it became a "statutory nuisance", a provision introduced in respect of noise by the Noise Abatement Act 1960, but owing its origins to the Public Health Act 1848, and the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Acts 1848 and 1849, and the amendment and consolidation
Act of 1855.
As such, the case fell to the local authority to take action â which it had failed to do for many years as the problem had become steadily worse. When I inherited the patch, I found a file several inches thick detailing the many complaints and the [lack] of action so far taken.
The problem was that, in order to initiate legal proceedings, we needed objective evidence â i.e., measurements of the vibration levels produced by the explosions, demonstrably in excess of acceptable norms.
To get that evidence was not going to be easy but, after some research (pre-internet days), I was able to borrow from what was then Huddersfield Polytechnic, some kit from a very helpful engineering department. This we set up to monitor the explosions.
Meanwhile, a new law had just come into force, the
Control of Pollution Act 1974. At the time, although we were in the EEC, "environment" was not a competence. Our Government was still doing its job in this sphere. And for us, tucked away in Section 58, Subsection 7 was a "gift" which an imaginative young lawyer in the chief executive's department decided we could use.
This would enable us, after having served notice on the quarry owner and thus established an offence when he blasted in breach of the conditions I had set, to by-pass the Magistrates' Court. We could go straight to the High Court and apply for an injunction to shut down the quarry.
To cut a very long story short, with the aid of local residents and the ever-willing Huddersfield Polytechnic, I managed to measure the blast effect. The vibration, expressed in the arcane criteria of "peak particle velocity", picked up by high-definition accelerometers, was way above what could be considered acceptable. Within hours, the evidence was in front of the High Court in Leeds and we got our injunction. The quarry closed down and never re-opened.
Subsequently, the key provisions of the Control of Pollution Act were re-enacted in the
Environmental Protection Act, including the noise provisions which I had used to such great effect. But, by then, it incorporated many provisions from what was soon to be the European Union. In addition, it gave
powers to the Secretary of State to enact Community legislation (and other international agreements).
The key element of this Act was to introduce an entirely new structure to pollution control in the UK, known as Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC). Initially, it was enforced by by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Pollution (HMIP), which charged substantial fees for regulating industrial plants.
By this means we saw established the concept of the Sefra (Self-financing Regulatory Agency), turning law enforcement into a lucrative business opportunity. Massive charges were
imposed, amounting to hidden taxation on industry, paid ultimately by the consumer.
Now this is precisely the sort of "red tape" that must be removed from the statute book if Vote Leave is to meet its target of saving billions from scrapping all these burdensome "regulations", one of its claimed advantages of leaving the EU.
For this, however, the idle children of Vote Leave rely on a facile piece of work conducted by
Open Europe in which it is asserted that the "top 100 EU rules" cost the nation £33.3 billion a year.
Interestingly, the Environmental Protection Act is not even mentioned in this work, even though it is the fount of much subsidiary and costly legislation.
Its premise, though, that this £33.3 billion represents an annual cost which can be saved by leaving the EU â as espoused by Vote Leave â is something I describe technically in the BBC Radio 4 programme
More or Less as "bollocks".
In the first instance, much of the regulation to which Open Europe refers is of global or regional origin, which we would still have to implement outside the EU. Much of the rest replaces national law that we would have to be implemented anyway, with the EU simply updating it. Sometimes, this has been at the behest of Member States, such as the food hygiene regulations, where the latest round of changes was initiated by the UK.
Of the balance, much of this is commercially orientated, and most businesses would adopt it anyway â the so-called
Brussels effect. They need the certainty and predictability that regulation brings to the business environment. Overall, therefore, there are virtually no savings to be gained in the short- to medium-term.
When they
first made it in October 2013, we took the Open Europe claim apart. Then
Business for Britain made
the same errors in 2015 and we took their claims apart as well. Then we saw the
Treasury Committee trash the figure.
But such subtleties as facts have never troubled Vote Leave. They ignore such minor details in favour of
their propaganda, relying entirely the Open Europe work as their source.
As to a more nuanced look at regulation, Vote Leave isn't on this planet.
To illustrate the nature of the problem, though, all we have to do is go back to the Environmental Protection Acct 1990, and its precursor legislation which goes back to the 19th Century.
In the current legislation, there is much which is good and necessary. Its removal would be opposed by any right-thinking people. After all, who would want to stop a local authority taking action against a rogue quarry-owner who is causing actual damage to properties in the neighbourhood â much less against the multiplicity of other "statutory nuisances", against which local authorities routinely take action.
But even when it comes to integrated pollution control, the situation is far from clear-cut. There is
little dispute that the best way to tackle industrial pollution is by way of implementing integrated controls, dealing with air, land and water pollution under the same enforcement "roof".
So well-established is the idea that the EU (and formerly the EEC) is by no means the only player in advocating this approach. In 1991, the OECD was
recommending integrated control, and was further to endorse the idea
in 1996. The essence of the problem in the UK, therefore, appears not to be the system itself, but
its implementation. It has been "haphazard, incremental and protracted", and is still only partially completed.
What this suggests, therefore, is that each major piece of legislation will need to be examined, with great care. But it is not only the wording that must be looked at. We must also investigate the nature and the functioning of the systems and institutions created by legislation, and examine how they work. Only when we have substitutes in place can we even consider re-writing the legislation.
On top of all that, we cannot under any circumstances risk throwing the babies out with the bathwater. In many major legislative instruments, we see confection of international, European Union and national requirements, so intertwined that it is sometimes impossible to tell which is which. Some of it is good, and we will want to keep it. Only the bad needs to be removed.
Thus, the option presented in
Flexcit is the repatriation of the entire EU
acquis â as it applies to the UK â and a measured review over time. We also recall that this was the option adopted by the Indian government on independence in 1948. But it was not until 1956 before it appointed a review commission to start the work of weeding out unwanted legislation.
We can hardly see the UK acting much faster â or at all. Now, there are different ways of doing things, especially with the onset of globalisation.
The great benefit of leaving the EU is that we regain control at the true European level (with UNECE) and in the many global bodies of which we are members. Not only do we regain our votes, though, we also regain the right of initiative. We can propose new measures at global level and, by fostering alliances, change the global perspective.
Over time, this will have the effect of re-shaping not just the national but the global rule books â exploiting the WTO Agreement on TBTs - to the benefit of the entire world trading system. That is far more credible a vision than the obsessive, negative focus of the official "leave" campaign. And in the final analysis, most savings will come from better and more effective regulation.
