Clause 3 - Licences to abstract water
Water Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
Mr Bill Wiggin (Leominster, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 3, in
clause 3, page 2, line 29, at beginning insert—
'( ) Each licence to abstract water shall be issued in response to an application for planning permission.
( ) The Environment Agency shall be consulted as part of the planning decision.'.
Unlike my colleagues, Mr. Amess, I have not welcomed you to the Chair, and I should like to do that straight away. The amendment addresses the relationship between water abstraction and planning. I am no expert on legal drafting, planning or water abstraction. However, I want to ensure that any business that wishes to abstract—when I wrote the amendment I had in mind quarries and mineral water companies—has to take just one course of action in order to develop. At present, it would have to have an abstraction licence that was a separate entity to the planning application that would need to be granted in the case of quarrying abstract sand, gravel, rock or any type of stone.
It is rarely possible to quarry without abstracting water. That is why the amendment would draw together the planning application and the abstraction licence application. It would ensure that for environmental reasons the Environment Agency is part of the consultation when the planning application is under review.
I hope that that is clear. It is not a complicated concept but it is important, because if planning applications are separate from abstraction licences, the abstraction licence may have a shorter life than the planning application, in which case businesses that have permission to extract rock, for example, may not be allowed to do so in the long term. It would be short-sighted of any measure to allow such a delay; if it is environmentally safe to abstract water, the business should be able to go ahead, provided that it has planning permission. Would not it be so much better if it were all part of the same process? Would not it be better to streamline the legislative burden so that businesses could compete on a level playing field with those abroad? We recognise that there would be a benefit, especially for quarries, if their abstraction licence was coterminous with their planning permission.
There is little point in issuing planning permission without an abstraction licence, because when that expires so, effectively, will the planning permission. Businesses should not be hamstrung by separating the two.