Defra accused in row over waste recycling

The Country Land & Business Association (CLA) says the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency, between them, have come up with a licensing formula which will discourage participation and achieve no public benefit.

Civil servants want to control permits for anaerobic digesters, using the gas produced by fermentation of organic materials, but agreed on an exemption for small operations.

But the exemption now published would be useless and would amount to a tax of thousands of pounds on each project, says the CLA, which has called on Mr Benn to intervene.

The heart of the dispute is the size of slurry tanks which require a licence before they can be capped and tapped for the gas they give off.

The government proposed 1,000 cubic metres and the CLA said that would not be enough to be useful.

Almost any livestock farmer in a Nitrate Vulnerable Zone would have that much slurry capacity and the government proposal would simply mean they paid extra to use it in a different way.

The CLA said 3,000 cubic metres would be more realistic. But the compromise is only 1,250 – and a plant output of less than 0.4 megawatts, whatever fuel it uses. The CLA says that is less power than a lot of lorry engines generate and 1.5 megawatts would be more like it.

President, William Worsley, of Hovingham, near Helmsley, said: "Almost every biogas plant installation will need a permit. It will be a major disincentive to recycling and renewable energy." The CLA is also concerned about woolly wording which does not make clear when manure starts to be classed as "feedstock going for digestion" and is therefore subject to Environment Agency rules on waste processing. It is hard to say exactly what the new rules would cost, according to the CLA's chief surveyor, Oliver Harwood.

But Environment Agency charges, plus the costs of an application to the agency, plus extra costs for compliance with its requirements, would be at least 5,000 a case, he guessed.

He said: "The EA say they are working on producing a standard permit for a farm-based biogas plant, which will cost 2,500, plus another 1,000 per year for renewal. But, and this is a big but, the rules attached to the draft standard permit add about 10 per cent to build costs and at least that amount to operating costs."

The Environment Agency says it has to protect the public from the risks of pollution or explosion and needs a small exemption limit to stop small farmers pooling their operations unsupervised.

The CLA says slurry stores being tapped for gas are more likely to be leak-tight than those which are simply stores for muck-spreading; the risk of explosion is tiny; and the Environment Agency and the health and safety inspectorate have plenty of powers already.

Tom Megginson and a business partner are spending 8m on a 2MW anaerobic digester, to run on food waste from factories, shops and domestic rubbish bins, on his family's arable farm at Kirkburn, near Driffield.

He said: "We need a bespoke permit anyway and we have spent 30,000 trying to get one. That is fair enough but the process is very hard work and would put off a lot of small-scale applications – and it is widespread small scale take-up Defra wants."