The Corry Review recommends a number of changes in the way environmental regulation operates in the short term, and declares itself a hiking of aspirations for both economic growth and the natural world. It’s a juggling act that successive governments have attempted to pull off. Titled Delivering Economic Growth and Nature Recovery: An Independent Review of Defra’s Regulatory Landscape, the 64-page document, produced by economist Dan Corry, sets out 29 recommendations intended to have “a system level impact”, changing the regulatory landscape and its associated culture.
So far, Kier Starmer has attempted to strike a bullish tone on “Nimbys and zealots”, which has generated some thoughtful push back. The Corry Report certainly seems to advance a more cautious ethos, with assurances of “holding back at this stage from major institutional change in terms of the boundaries of the regulators,” but with seemingly decisive efforts to clear away obstacles to development.
We do need to prioritise the environment, the document is at pains to state, “[b]ut in mitigating our impacts, we shouldn’t be rigidly protecting everything exactly as it is, at any cost,” says an early passage. “Our approach must also make ample space for innovation, development and growth.”
Licensing and permitting is one aspect of this, with Defra considered to be “too slow and lacking in transparency”. With regulation, it seems to be a case of too much in places – with some stakeholders, notably farmers, struggling to navigate regulations of Byzantine complexity – but also too little elsewhere, with the scale and urgency of the waste crime problem, for example, necessitating a readier willingness to wield the stick.
The “thin green line”
Corry recommends that greater autonomy be afforded to trusted conservation groups and environmental partners, with the judicious use of memoranda of understanding (MOUs) and ‘class licences’, which should be deployed more widely, “enabling [stakeholders] to move fast on restoring nature without applying to regulators for multiple permissions.” And this will require developing precise and consistent criteria for the conferring of such freedoms, which should include consideration of the organization’s track record in things like “organisational compliance and positive real-world impact”.
Similarly, the review recommends expediting existing progress with updating the permitting regulations “to allow regulators more flexibility to take sensible, risk-based decisions”. This has a bearing especially on “supporting net-zero and circular economy priorities, such as facilitating the development of low carbon industrial infrastructure, and for ensuring remediated soil is not unnecessarily categorised as waste.”
Penny Simpson, Environmental Law Partner at law firm Freeths, attempted to place the report in context: “The fundamental problem with modern economies is that good intentions to try to address problems as they emerge can, over the long run, lead to a steady accretion of rules and regulations which stifle innovation.”
“Successive Governments as they take office have tried, and largely failed, to address this issue and this Government is no exception. The Corey Review is just the latest in a long list of attempts at implementing ‘smarter’ and ‘leaner’ regulatory frameworks.”
Key to the likely success of this attempt, she said, would be whether it “recognises the importance of a high integrity and appropriately governed private nature market which can successfully attract investment and thereby grow.”
Indeed the report recommends that Defra explore launching “a Nature Market Accelerator to bring much needed coherence to nature markets and accelerate investment’”.
“It’s not clear what this means but it sounds encouraging,” she said, seemingly in accord with the document’s insistence on the wrong-headedness of framing this area of policy as requiring an “either/or” decision between growth or the environment.
Fluid strategies
Some regulations even create barriers that hamper efforts to improve the environment, and legal difficulties appeared irresolvable with Wessex Water’s attempt to provide an NBS storm overflow last year, although the utility was commended for its decision to proceed with the plans anyway. Such anomalies appear to be addressed by a recommendation in the review that nature-based solutions might be allowed to dispense with their current requirement for full planning permission. In other words, to no longer require the same level of permission as other types of infrastructure, and thereby circumvent some of these barriers of time and cost. “Defra should conduct a six-month sprint, with industry, on removing the barriers to using NBS to flooding and pollution.” The barriers include things like planning, benefit-to-cost ratios, and biodiversity net gain. It should “propose a way of reducing or removing these,” says the review.
Some change to regulations seem destined to proceed from the review’s recommendations but these would be “to allow a wider perspective to be taken that is good for nature overall”.
The lack of uniformity in guidance between different regulators is one problem with things as they stand, and the review recommends publishing new Strategic Policy Statements for all regulators, ensuring consistency across them all.
“A bonfire of regulations is not the way forward,” says the document at another point, in a section about untangling ‘green tape’. Rather, Corry outlines a programme of streamlining and modernising to ensure regulations are “relevant to [Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP)] targets, fit for the future and provide discretion to deliver good outcomes for nature and growth in a place”. Early priorities pegged in the document include The Water Environment (Water Framework Directive) (England and Wales) Regulations 2017; and The Environmental Permitting Regulations 2016.
One area of confusion that incurs an environmental cost at present is slurry application and storage, and the document recommends reform here “to help address diffuse water pollution, creating a circular economy for nutrients and boosting farming productivity.”
Outdated IT has been a flashpoint of criticism of regulators in recent times, which the review doesn’t overlook with its recommendation that they undergo a shift to become “more digital, more real-time and more innovative with partners”. It recommends appointing two ‘digital champions’ to oversee this progress, which should encompass efforts to “increase the transparency of the work of regulators by making live monitoring information accessible to the public, so they can see for themselves how regulators are improving the environment in their area.”
The review makes clear that it is concerned with improving how the regulatory system operates in the short term, while indicating a direction of travel for securing other changes in the long term.
