Well, on the face of it, not necessarily a huge barrier. In these sorts of engineering works, you would expect to have to get planning permission, because development includes engineering and with the sort of activity that's going on, you'd expect to have an environmental permit, because you're shifting waste around. So, there will be a need to get the necessary permits and permissions. There may be some more specific permissions. So, NRW may be involved in issuing tree-felling licences, or if there is a particular protected species on a site, like a badger, then Natural Resources Wales will have to license the work. So, a certain amount of work goes on, but it's work that goes on all the time. But there are two provisos. The first proviso is: whose responsibility? So, if you take clause 33 of the Bill, then the authority can demand that an owner undertake this work. So, all of those responsibilities, all of the dealing with all of that regulation would then fall upon the owner. And you can argue, and I think I probably would argue, that's as it should be—they are the owner of the land in question; it's their task. But in serving that notice, the work has to have a time period within which it's completed, and I do think it's going to be very important that that time period includes all the time necessary to get the relevant permissions. I'll come back to that, because the second thing I'm going to talk about is time.
What if it's urgent? What if we have a high-risk tip that demands attention absolutely right now? If we take the planning permission, there'll be a service agreement with the unitary authority, the planning authority, within which time frame they will issue a planning permission. Very often in Wales, that will be a four-month period. Can we wait four months? I mean, in Tylorstown, when all the spoil came down, all of that needed waste environment permits under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016, and that, again, could take an awful long period of time. And it can get even more complex than that, if an environmental impact assessment is necessary to do the work—and I'm not going to explain that, but if you want to come back, I'm happy to try. But if an environmental impact assessment is necessary, that prolongs the period even further.
And then finally, if there is a habitat, well, even if there isn't a habitat, we may want to do a preliminary ecological assessment before we apply for planning permission, but if there's a habitat, and roughly 100 of these tips are SSSIs—sites of special scientific interest—and a further 30-odd are almost top-tier special areas of conservation, then there will have to be in that case—the final case—a habitats regulations assessment, which is quite a big job. And seasonality kicks in, because there's no point in going and looking at what's on the tip in November and trying to do your ecological assessment. You need to be doing your ecological assessment in spring when things are up and about.
So, that's what I worry about, right? I worry about how we are going to cope with that. And the Law Commission did look at this, and the Law Commission did suggest, and I had conversations with the Law Commission about this, that maybe ministerial directions would be the way ahead. So, you issue a ministerial direction and you say, 'That absolves you from the need to get planning permission right now, but do apply and get that planning permission as quickly as you can, but you will not commit any offences under planning legislation if you proceed with the work without that planning permission.' That seems to me to be a perfectly good way ahead, but it's not one that's included in the Bill.