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• The discharge shall not contain drainage from chemical, oil or other polluting
matter loading/unloading/handling areas.
• Do not dispose of oil, paint or paint thinners, pesticides, detergents, disinfectants
or other pollutants into a surface drainage system, or allow any material that might
impair its performance and function to enter a surface water drainage system.
GBRs, Registration or Licences?
The CAR regulatory regime allows for three levels of authorisation (Part II, regulations
7–10), and SEPA may serve a notice on a person responsible for an activity, to
change the level of authorisation (regulation 11). The most basic level is the General
Binding Rule (GBR); essentially this way of controlling activity simply establishes the
requirements to prevent environmental harm. It is an offence to carry out the activity
in breech of those requirements. A precedent is the way the oil storage regulations
have been established in England and Wales, and the successive regulations across
the UK for controlling pollution risks associated with the storage of silage, slurry and
agricultural fuel oil. For existing establishments there is no need to register with the
regulatory agency, but enforcement can be undertaken by notices on inspection.
The GBR is therefore the least bureaucratic regulatory option. To quote the recent
rural diffuse pollution consultation by the Scottish Executive (2005):
‘…as far as is practicable, the basic level of authorisation, national GBRs, should be
used as the basis of control. This minimises the regulatory burden on the industry,
while requiring a basic minimum of action to be taken to prevent pollution…’
Registration is the next level of authorisation, requiring the farmer to register the farm
with SEPA, and to comply with a simple set of pollution control measures. A fee will
be payable to cover administrative costs; there could also be a subsistence charge
to cover the costs for SEPA of inspections and meetings on the farms and associated
office work. For the rare situations where a particular farm or other rural enterprise
is individually significant in a catchment, then SEPA may require an authorisation
in the form of a licence for the farm. That would allow for site-specific conditions,
rechargeable costs for monitoring and inspection.
Licences have previously been held by many farmers, for example for septic
tank discharges under COPA and earlier legislation, and more recently under the
groundwater regulations. Under the CAR, these will be transferred to become either
registrations or licences.
What is Missing in CAR for Managing Diffuse Pollution from Rural
Sources?
The gaps are how to control the individually minor but collectively significant impacts;
background contamination that is a function of land-use – as identified in the Scottish
Executive consultation (2005) Diffuse Water Pollution from Rural Land Use. The
SEPA strategy document for managing diffuse pollution (SEPA, 2004) highlighted
the importance of the Best Management Practices (BMPs) approach developed
in the USA (see chapter 2 in Campbell et al., 2004, definitions and discussions in
Novotny 2003, and D’Arcy and Frost, 2001). Many of the BMPs in those references
are addressing aspects of farming and forestry practice that have not hitherto been
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