Latest on the NRW enquiry.
All,
The inquiry was formally closed yesterday (Thursday 7 March) after 16 days of evidence had been presented (it’s been a long 16 days!). The adversarial nature of the inquiry resulted in those supporting the anglers being subjected to some very hard cross examination by the barrister employed by NRW who tried his best (and generally failed) to discredit us.
Prior to the start of the inquiry we challenged the process which was to be used. The inquiry was advertised as a ‘Local Public Inquiry’ and was to be run using the Planning Inspectorate and the Applications and Appeals Procedure (Wales) Regulations 2017 and not The Inquiries Act 2005. I wrote to the Minister to query the use of the planning appeals procedure her response letter is attached. Taken on face value the response from the Minister appears to be reasonable however on the appointment of the inspector, Declan Beggan, I carried out a Google search and found that he was the inspector for an appeal against a planning application decision by NRW against a Hydro Development. Beggan found in favour of NRW based upon the ‘precautionary principle’. Unfortunately this reference has since been removed from the public domain but this was the link on Google which now does not bring up the information detail:
3 Aug 2016 · DipTP DipMan MRTPI by Declan Beggan BSc (Hons) MSc DipTP. DipMan MRTPI .... It is the UK Government policy that the NRW follows a precautionary approach with respect to the HD. Amongst other ...
Now it may just be coincidence that NRW had won a planning appeal based upon the ‘precautionary principle’ and that the byelaw inquiry was to be run under the same rules and coincidentally with the same inspector. There is however an appearance of bias in this. It quickly became apparent that the barrister for NRW repeatedly referred to the ‘precautionary principle’ and that this would be part of the defence of the byelaw proposals. This is not to cast doubt on the integrity of the inspector but he well have been compromised due to his previous judgement in favour of NRW siding with them based upon the precautionary principle. It remains to be seen what his final recommendations to the Minister will be, this will be delivered to the Minister on 17 May. The inspector said he has three choices these are to recommend approval of the byelaws, approve with amendments or reject the byelaws.
We believe we put forward a very strong case demonstrating that the byelaws in themselves will not achieve the objective of reversing the decline in migratory fish stocks pointing out that NRW accepts that anglers are not the problem. The inspector seems to believe that the promised land reform legislation which the Minister has said will be legislated in 2020 with a phased implementation i.e. it will never be fully delivered was in support to the proposed byelaws and you will see in my closing statement that I have challenged him on this. The evidence from Mike Ashwin on the problems with the present methodology to determine the conservation limit demonstrates the flaws in the present system. The barrister for NRW went out of his way to prevent this evidence being heard.
I have attached the closing statements from me, John Eardley, Reuben Woodford and Mike Ashwin. Our closing statements seemed to have annoyed the barrister for NRW. Due to the 4 week recesses it was apparent that the barrister had drafted his closing statement based upon the previous three weeks believing that there was nothing we could add in our closing statements which would cause him a problem – how wrong he was.
The NRW closing statement was updated over lunch break following our closing statements and runs to some 69 pages it basically reflects the NRW technical case with notes to discredit the CPWF evidence. I have been misquoted several times on comments I made during my 3.5 hour cross examination. The problem was we were facing a criminal lawyer who used closed and leading questions to discredit us. It was obvious that he was rattled by our closing statements as he kept on moving from his written statement with asides to try and discredit us. It seems that they will update the NRW closing statement after the inquiry closed and send the updated version to the inspector, we will of course complain if this occurs. The asides included telling the inspector that we had wasted inquiry time as under cross examination he had had to get us to read the NRW evidence as although we had read this none of us had instant recall of the contents (there are circa 250 documents in the NRW core evidence and proof of evidence/rebuttals). He also complained that whilst we had raised funds for an independent report from the Dublin statisticians we should have raised funds so that we could have legal representation at the inquiry which would have made things easier (for him?). This raises another interesting issue it seems that we could have applied for ‘Rule 6’ Status apparently this is available for groups who are not legally represented and they can nominate one person to act as an advocate which would have enabled us to re-examine our witnesses. We found this out by accident at the beginning of the third week. We should have been told this at the pre-inquiry meeting. By not telling us this we were further disadvantaged whether this was an oversight or deliberate we will never know.
We have done our best and if we loose we will put in an appeal. In the meantime we are preparing a press release based upon the above information but we have to take time to craft this to ensure we will not libel NRW.
Chris
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