Clause 19 - Protected rights
Water Bill [Lords]
11:00 am
Mr Bill Wiggin (Leominster, Conservative)
Protected rights are an area where the Government have made a significant change to the current situation, effectively by taking away protected rights and ensuring that all people who had licences to abstract in perpetuity now have a time limit on that, albeit one of 12 years—it may be for longer, but will be with any kind of certainty for only 12 years. The change is intended to address the problem of people who have a licence but do not use it.
I feel that the wording in the Bill is inadequate, because the period of reference—the time limit—in new subsection (8)(a) is four years. I have sought in
amendment No. 38 to make it six years. Hon. Members might wonder why I have chosen six years; it is because it fits in with CAMS, the catchment abstraction management strategies, which are the new way of assessing abstraction. Particularly with the Government's intention to license genetically modified crops, crop rotation will become an even longer and more important cycle. A four-year period does not even take into consideration the weather, which I think generally operates on a seven-year cycle. Because CAMS has a six-year period, I felt that we should have a six-year period in the Bill to tie in with that.