|
3. Development and Improvement of the CAC system: answered the failures per se
Britain, the earliest industrialised country as well as having the longest history of industrial pollution, can boast the precursor of ‘modern’ environmental legislations. The CAC regulations could be traced back to administrative statutes in mid-nineteenth century. While CAC prevailed in the later half of twentieth-century, a ‘Britain approach’ to regulating environmental protection was explained as:
An absence of statutory standards, minimal use of prosecution, a flexible enforcement strategy, considerable administrative discretion, decentralised implementation, close co-operation between regulators and the regulated, and restrictions on the ability of non-constituents to participate in the regulatory process.
By focusing on the air pollution control, particularly on the perceived failures, we can find out how this traditional approach developed and improved in respects of legislation, enforcement and setting standards.
In the mid-nineteenth century when the pollution had become ‘extensive and unprecedented’ and the limitation of common law in pollution control had been recognized, the early legislations were, interactive with common law, targeted towards the protection of public health rather than environmental protection, resulting in filling the gap between nuisance of private law and the protection of statutory mechanism. In terms of industrial air pollution, the Alkali Act 1863 was created to face a new evil---acid rain that caused the harm in St Helens of Lancashire was reported as ‘not having a single tree with any foliage on it’ . The reactive tendency lasted almost a century, recent examples is the Clear Air Act 1956 passed for controlling smoke in response to the Beaver Report before which a London smoke lasted 5 days in December 1952, causing 4,000 additional deaths.
Furthermore, although the first national public pollution control agency, the Alkali Inspectorate, was established under Alkali Act 1863, most protection of environment was carried out at a local level by a vast array of local broads or local authorities later. While laws reacted the particular type of pollutants, legislations were often authorised separate bodies to be responsible for different pollution, even overlapping emissions and powers (e.g. Alkali Inspectorate dealt with industrial noxious fume but local authorities were responsible for smoke control). The CAC system having varying standards and enforcement mechanisms failed to meet the expected goals. It is easy to be understood that in order to avoid strict air emission standards, wastes might be dumped in landfill rather than incinerated. Failures of such a fragmented approach focused on overlapping controls, lacking of public accountability, absence of viewing the environment as a whole, and uncertainty of wide discretions. These obstacles required to be overcome by, a unified enforcement system, centralising implementation and legislation. In 1976, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) recommended to set up a unified inspectorate and a holistic approach by introducing a concept as ‘best practicable environmental option’ (BPEO). As a delayed result, the uniformity emerged after ten years. Two main indicators are the establishment of, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution (HMIP) in 1987 to draw a number of independent inspectorates together, the National Rivers Authority (NRA) in 1989 to centralise the regional authorities into a national body. On April 1st 1996, the creation of the Environment Agency (EA) under the Environment Act 1995, should be regarded as the true integrated body which took over all the functions of HMIP, NRA, and 83 local authorities. For same reasons, the centralized statute, Environmental Protection Act 1990 (EPA), eventually adopted the principle of Integrated Pollution Control（IPC）as well as the BPEO. In order to implement EC Directive 96/61 on integrated pollution prevention and control (IPPC), a new regime for IPPC for England and Wales has established by passing Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) Act 1999 and PPC Regulation 2000, which is to ‘introduce a more integrated approach to controlling the pollution from industrial sources’.
|
