Issue 15 Environment Minister Arlene Foster MLA: Environmental challenges

arlene foster

Although perhaps not the biggest spending department, the environment portfolio has a major impact on people, from planning, protecting the environment through to road safety. Owen McQuade discusses her priorities with Environment Minister Arlene Foster.

What are your priorities in terms of policy?

In the Programme for Government, one of our five key areas is protecting and enhancing the environment. That sends out a very positive message to the wider community in Northern Ireland, that the environment is one of the key issues for the Executive, not just for me and the DoE.

We [the department] have some very big issues coming over the horizon: the reform of planning service, reform of local government, environmental governance, PPS14, waste infrastructure and waste management.

Taking these in turn: Let’s start with planning reform. What are the objectives of the planning review and when will it be completed?

We brought Professor Greg Lloyd in from Liverpool University to give a fresh perspective into the planning system over here. That’s for the long term but we’re also looking at short term measures. Already up in the Londonderry Division they’re doing some very good work on streamlining the planning processes whereby very straightforward planning applications now do not go to council for approval. The Planning Service is working very much in partnership with the councils up there, and feedback from the councillors and planning officers is that that is going very well. I’ve heard one anecdotal story with an applicant saying: how can I possibly have a green form within three weeks, there must have been a mistake!

At the other end of the scale, the Strategic Projects Unit has given a commitment in the Programme for Government to turn those applications round in six months – obviously if there have been effective pre-application discussions. Part of that is setting up of a multi-disciplinary team within the headquarters unit which will have the expertise of the Roads Service and EHS readily available. When people come to have their pre-application discussions, all the agencies will be within the one area and we will tap into that. We’re quite excited about what’s going on there. Six months is a very challenging target for us in the department but it has been done already with a number of big applications and we feel we can continue to meet that challenge.

Under the RPA, if it goes ahead as we think it will, local government will have development control for planning applications and indeed will have a more strategic control in local planning as well. There’s obviously a modernisation and a capacity-building role to be done in local government, not only in planning but in all of the functions that will be going down to them in 2011.

We’re working very closely with the Strategic Leadership Board, which includes local government representatives from each of the political parties.

Do we have a need for something like the Republic’s Strategic Infrastructure Act which would fasttrack applications through the planning system?

I think we’ve come at it slightly differently. For example, the North-South Interconnector will go to An Bord Pleanála, whereas in our jurisdiction it will go through the Article 31 [of the Planning (Northern Ireland) Order 1991] procedure. We all have the same aim in mind – that [applications] will be dealt with quickly and efficiently.

What is the status of RPA and the future shape of local government?

The announcement has to be imminent from a legislative point of view. If I don’t have agreement by the end of this month [February], then effectively we’re going to miss the legislative timeslot for doing it by 2011. If that happens, we’re going to have to run elections in 2009 and the reforms will not be place by 2013. I really hope that doesn’t happen because a lot of very good work has been done.

Reform in the sector is certainly well overdue and I know that they are frustrated by having to wait, but as well as the structural reform we have been looking at, there are issues about modernisation, which will go on regardless of the structural reform. We’ll be looking for the Department of Finance and Personnel to give us the money to do that modernisation with [councils].

Has your time spent in local government influenced your view of RPA?

I was glad that I was in local government because it does give me an insight into the work that was going on. Obviously, I wasn’t a councillor for the number of years that many are or have been in local government. During the 70s and 80s, it has to be acknowledged that the politicians on the ground doing the work were the local councillors, who didn’t get any pay at that point in time. A lot of them are now looking and waiting to see the reform that is coming, and I hope that it can be delivered for them. I do think they need an acknowledgement that they haven’t had to date.

What is the status of the Review of Environmental Governance?

There’s a very effective campaign by the NGOs on environmental governance and about a month after I came into office, I received the report from Tom Burke. Unfortunately the report didn’t give any financial figures so we’ve been doing some work on that. We’ve also had the Criminal Justice Inspectorate report which looked at how we detected and prosecuted crimes and there are some things that I want to consider very seriously, such as the way that EHS prosecutes water pollution, illegal dumping and the whole issue of wildlife crime.

Regardless of the fact that NGOs are very effective in arguing their case, I have to listen to all of the voices that are coming to me, and that includes the Ulster Farmers’ Union, and the way they perceive environmental governance as being more red tape. I want to look at ways of dealing with all of those issues.

One of the arguments being put to me about an EPA is that everybody else has one, so we must have one. I think that’s a pretty vacuous argument, frankly. Whatever we have in regards to environmental governance should be what is right for Northern Ireland as we sit here today. I’m looking at all the options but I do not want this to drag on past the summer, so I’ll be coming to the House before then.

Next on the list is the thorny issue of PPS14. I know there is an announcement imminent but can you say something on this issue?

What is there left to say! PPS14 is one of those government acronyms that must be the most well-known to arlene foster the whole of Northern Ireland society. The whole debate about PPS14, and a presumption in favour of development versus a presumption against development, has developed in a very divided way. On one hand you’ve got the environmental lobby and on the other you’ve got people who want to build wherever they feel they need to build.

What we’ve been trying to do in the subcommittee, which was set up after the court case when PPS14 came over to us, is strike a more balanced approach based on the principles of sustainable development. In doing that, we recognise that the original PPS14 was very restrictive, the way in which it was brought in was wrong. What we want to do is to have consensus about the new policy, or as near to consensus as we can possibly get. That sub-committee has been working well. Whether the old farm viability test is really viable in today’s farming society was one of the first issues that was raised. The first meeting that we had was very constructive.

People now have distilled in their own minds the issues that need to be dealt with: replacement dwellings, the abandonment principle, whether it’s better to have a green-field site as opposed to a site which has an old building on it which could be reused.

As the Social Development Minister is involved in the sub-group, we also looked at what role social housing can play in the countryside, in dispersed rural communities. There’s also the need to provide for people with specific health needs – which was removed by the original PPS14 – and we’re bringing that in again to make sure that there is an independent health person who can look at the medical evidence.

We’ve had a good debate on it. It’s now out to stakeholders right across the province so we’ll wait and see what they have to bring back to us. There will always be people who may not be entirely happy with the policy but hopefully they will be happier with the new policy.

Has coming from a rural constituency helped your perspective on PPS14?

I think it has. Fermanagh and the West have been the areas which have been very much pushing on PPS14, and the need for rural dwellers, if they have a genuine need, to live in the countryside has always been very much argued by local councillors and other elected representatives.

What are the priorities on waste?

It’s possibly the least sexy of all of my portfolios but probably one of the most important for a whole lot of reasons, not least the fact that the European Landfill Directive is there and needs to be complied with. If it is not complied with, we’re going to suffer financially for that. The Strategic Waste Management Board has been working very well with the department. We now have very good structures in place to take waste infrastructure forward and indeed, importantly for me, communication about why we need to be looking at recycling and different ideas about what we do with our waste.

Unfortunately, to date that discussion and awareness has not been out there. We had a good campaign some years ago – Wake Up to Waste – which was quite visible and it’s important to get that message out there again.

I think we need a budget to deal with those issues because frankly some people feel: ‘Well, if I recycle this bottle, is it really going to make a difference?’ But if everybody takes that attitude, then nobody’s going to do anything. Personal responsibility is key to all of this.

We were able to secure £196 million from the Strategic Investment Board for waste infrastructure, which is about 50 per cent of the cost, and the rest is coming from local government. Local government were delighted with that settlement, and so were we, because it showed our commitment to helping to deal with waste. It was the maximum we thought we could achieve.

Moving onto the big issue of climate change, can Northern Ireland make an impact on such a global issue?

Climate change is one of those overarching themes. I think there’s been more discussion and emphasis on climate change not just since I came into office but over this past year than there has ever been. We signed up to the UK Climate Change Bill and the Government has just appointed the Chairman of the Climate Change Committee [Lord Turner]. He’s coming over to Northern Ireland in March to meet with us. That’s a good recognition that they are taking in all the devolved administrations and listening to what they have to say.

It is still a huge issue for us in Northern Ireland. Although we are only 2.8 per cent of the UK, there still a lot of issues that we need to tackle such as adaptation, what we need to do to stop flooding in the future and what impact climate change will have for us. Documents such as ‘Shifting Sands’ which came out from the National Trust and the UK Climate Impacts Programme – which provides us with data on what will happen over the next 10, 15, 20 years – are all very useful, not only to me as Planning Minister but it’s also useful to DRD, in their road planning, to DETI, to DARD and the Rivers Agency. Climate change goes right across government.

How important is the all-island aspect of your portfolio?

We have a good relationship. Obviously, there are a number of different Ministers depending on which part of the portfolio we are looking at.

In particular, in road safety, we have a very good relationship with the Department of Transport and we will continue to have those joint campaigns, because they have been very effective. It doesn’t sit ‘naturally’ with some of the natural environment things we have been talking about but it is a key priority and one on which we work closely with our Southern counterparts.

In relation to illegal waste, I have been disappointed with the speed at which we have been able to repatriate some of the waste. Illegal waste has been a big issue for us since about 2002 and there have been two big sites – one in Fermanagh and one in Tyrone – where we have been trying to get the waste brought back to the South. I took the initiative to write to John Gormley and just yesterday we had a letter from Dublin City Council – the appropriate authority in the South – that they will take back the illegal waste. That is something that we are pleased about and we will push on with that.

We have done a lot of ‘Water Matters’ seminars on river basin management. We share international river basins with the South –North Western, Neagh Bann and a very small part of the Shannon – and obviously we co-operate very closely with them in relation to that.

You have also road safety within your portfolio.

One of our programmes in the Programme for Government is to reduce road deaths by 33 per cent and child road deaths by 50 per cent. That is again a challenging target and people have said: “Well, something like that is largely out of your hands; it’s down to people’s driving.” At the end of the day, with what we did with seatbelts and the way in which we changed attitudes and behaviour in the 70s, there has been an attitudinal change, and we need to do exactly the same with speed and drink and drugs.

How can Northern Ireland’s built heritage be protected?

We are working very hard on built heritage and indeed there will be some announcements later in the year on how we are hoping to develop ways to help those who have listed buildings. I very much value built heritage; Belfast is a very special place and I want it to stay that way. When we’re looking at the economy driving the new Northern Ireland, that’s right; but when people come to Belfast, they come because it is slightly different than, say, Manchester or Liverpool.

If there is one thing that you want to have achieved by the end of your term, what would it be?

The reform of the planning system is a huge challenge for us to tackle. It’s not just about changing structures, I think it’s about changing the culture of the planning system, and the Planning Service, and also changing people’s views and perceptions.