A small group of the approximately 500 companies that work with large quantities of hazardous substances are “frequently violating environmental legislation”. In addition, tackling environmental crime and environmental violations is “inadequate”. That is what the Court of Audit writes in an article published this afternoon report.
Companies that work with large quantities of hazardous substances can be found in the chemical industry and storage. Examples of where this went wrong are, for example, the fire at Chemiepack in Moerdijk in 2011, which caused a dangerous situation was created for the environment.
It is striking that the scale of this type of environmental crime was initially unknown to the Ministry of Infrastructure & Water Management and the Inspectorate for Living Environment & Transport. There is no complete overview of supervision and enforcement, which means that the entire chain of information provision is not in order. The Court of Audit has now mapped this out for the first time.
Nearly 3,500 times during the 20,000 inspections, one or more violations were identified. It is striking that there is a relatively small group of frequent offenders: 17% of the companies inspected are responsible for half of all detected violations. In 56% of the criminal cases, 30 companies (6%). The Court of Audit recommends publishing the results of inspections in future.
Defective registration
The reason that there was no insight into this before is due to the “deficient registration” by the environmental services. Sometimes information is even missing. “We have fallen out of our chair,” said Arno Visser, president of the Court of Audit. “It was sometimes not clear which inspection and enforcement data belong to which company.” Moreover, in no less than a third of the violations, the seriousness of the violation was not stated.
In the Netherlands, the monitoring of environmental violations and crime is carried out by the various regional environmental services. Earlier, a report drawn up by a committee led by Jozias van Aartsen showed that these services use different methods. The national enforcement strategy is not applied consistently. “As a result, the 29 environmental services are reinventing the wheel 29 times,” says Van Aartsen.
In addition, environmental services must all legally be connected to a central data system for the exchange of data, the so-called Inspection View. Nine environmental services are not yet. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management states in a response that it has been agreed that they must be connected by 1 January 2022 at the latest.
–
According to the Court of Audit, criminal cases have little deterrent effect. If a company is prosecuted, this usually ends with a transaction or penalty order of less than 10,000 euros. These are amounts that, according to the Court of Audit, often make up less than 1% of the companies’ profit or turnover.
“Fines should have a deterrent effect and should retaliate. Now it can be seen as a calculated risk. This is really an example that The Hague should look at.”
Visser: not interested in politics
Compliance with the rules by companies and the supervision thereof is a subject that Visser believes should be high on the agenda in The Hague. For the time being, there is “hardly any interest from politics”, says Visser. “But it is not a small beer. Ultimately, it is about the health of citizens.”
Van Aartsen says about this: “Except when there is a major affair such as at Tata Steel. That then comes to the fore and then we say: oh, how bad. But this is something structural.”
The Court of Audit recommends, among other things, to do the same registration everywhere and to develop a special approach for frequent offenders. Moreover, they want the violations to be made public.
Arno Visser and Jozias van Aartsen are guests at Nieuwsuur tonight, at 21:30 on NPO2.
–
