No quick solution for water

Date: 03/10/1996

By Michael Mann

STUNG by MEPs' rejection of its ideas, the European Commission could be forced to put its planned water framework directive on long-term hold.

After last week's adoption by the environment committee of a scathing critique of February's Commission communication, officials in Directorate-General XI (environment) are contemplating their next move.

The Commission was due to discuss the framework plan at its meeting next Wednesday (9 October), but the issue has now been taken off the agenda.

“The Parliament has delayed and delayed, and we have had to hold back,” said a Commission official this week.

Prospects for rapid agreement on a coherent approach to Union water policy have been stymied by inter-institutional wrangling and by rapporteur Karl-Heinz Florenz's withering criticism of the Commission's proposals.

“The Commission's communication has not only failed spectacularly to produce a coherent global approach for a European water policy, but also, in its general thrust, bodes ill for future European water protection policy,” said his report.

Commission officials strongly deny Florenz's charge that they are planning to abandon stringent limits on emissions into water supplies. “We want to combine both emission limits and an environmental quality objectives approach, but people do not seem to believe us,” commented an official.

DGXI has based its policy around setting water quality goals which will be backed up by the existing controls on emissions contained in the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive.

Many MEPs believe that the wording of the IPPC gives it insufficient teeth. Privately, even many within the Commission services agree with this view.

A dispute between the Commission and Parliament over whether the framework should be presented in the form of a draft directive or an action programme is also blocking progress on the issue.

MEPs, determined to secure a central role for themselves in designing the policy, have called for the framework to be adopted in the form of an “action programme”, which would have to be agreed by co-decision.

After consultations with member states, industry and environmental groups, officials had been working on preparing a draft directive, on which MEPs would only have the lesser right to be consulted.

“Turning that into an action programme would mean starting from the beginning,” warned an official, “and that could take ages”.

MEPs hope that an action programme drawn up under the co-decision procedure would be a prelude to a more binding directive which would simply embrace the main features of the programme.

But the Commission is unsure whether such an arrangement is even legally possible and doubts that a subsequent directive would simply take on board all the features of the action programme.

It is even uncertain which voting procedure to use if it decides to go ahead with a directive from the outset, as originally intended.

In the meantime, the Commission is anticipating that the full Parliament will adopt the Florenz report at its plenary session on 22 October.

If it does, Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard is likely to face a serious dilemma, with the Council of Ministers expected to endorse her overall approach while MEPs resoundingly reject it.

In theory, the Commission can proceed however it wishes as the document issued in February had no legal status. But, politically, it knows that to ignore the Parliament's comments would lead to charges of unaccountability.

The paper suggested basic monitoring of surface and groundwater, setting up a register of pollutants and careful checks on all potential pressures on the EU's dwindling water resources.

For the first time, controls were to be based on whole river basins, rather than leaving them to traditional local or regional authorities.

But the Commission's ideas ran into immediate criticism from environmentalists, who claimed opposition to emission limits from the UK and agricultural and industrial lobbies had forced it to drop the few effective parts of existing legislation, without anything meaningful to replace them.