'Minister Wiersma, it would be better if you didn't write anything'

The director asks not to mention a name, because he still has to go further with the ministry, but it could also have been the voice of any other PAS reporter. More than five years have passed and less than 1% of all 3.000 PAS reporters have really been helped out of the jam. In such a situation, a rather vague letter asking for a little more patience does not really help.

After 5,5 years, not 1 percent of PAS reporters helped
Being locked up for another three years as a company, many entrepreneurs can't handle that anymore. The bank is going to buck up, you can't develop. Everything is stuck.
For a civil servant with some legal and administrative training, it is not a big problem to advise the minister to wait a little longer with a decision, because it is quite a complicated matter. It feels like the safe route for him/her, but an entrepreneur cannot do anything with it. At most, it is an additional point of attack for a claim against the state if the company has to be closed down. After all, the central government has acknowledged that it feels responsible for the PAS situation.

PAS reporter wants to continue, but preliminary test…
However, stopping is not what the majority of PAS reporters want. They want to continue, but encounter many obstacles. Anyone who wants a nature permit (Wnb) or at least clarity that no (extra) permit is required for the contested situation, knows which route to follow. It starts with a preliminary assessment (see website BIJ12). That provides some clarity.

Unfortunately, in recent years - this year too - there have been enough cases where even a successful preliminary test could not be obtained, as provincial administrators acknowledge. An application for such a preliminary test was then rejected with the statement that the test would be inadmissible and no one cares that this is how it goes, because a declaration of inadmissibility of a preliminary test is not registered in the systems. Only the farmer notices something.

No registration
Why is an application declared inadmissible? There is no clear answer to this question yet, but the fact is that the question about this has already led to this issue being put on the agenda. It could be bureaucratic laziness, it could also be a sneaky move to keep PAS reporters in misery a little longer, others suspect. In provincial BBB circles, an administrative cordon is even suspected to maintain the nitrogen problem. A number of provinces indicate that it is more complicated, but there is no clarity either.

Too much ex-farmland
For some interests, there is much to be gained by the elimination of many farms. Buffer areas around nature are becoming wider and nature areas themselves can also be expanded more easily. Under the previous cabinet, when the National Rural Area Plan (NPLG) was still being worked on hard, the nature gain in terms of hectares of freed-up farmland seemed barely contained. Policy officers even warned internally about a surplus of ex-farmland, as can be read in recently released WOO documents on this subject. "A point of concern is whether sufficient land-based agricultural companies will remain to keep the grasslands in vulnerable nature areas in use," writes a civil servant from Brabant. A colleague counters somewhat soothingly that quite a few farmers and organisations are under the illusion that farming can still be profitable on land with usage restrictions.

Heated parts NPLG
The NPLG has been set aside, as has the Transition Fund, but many policies that were part of the NPLG are still in place. Minister Wiersma also does not want to set aside everything from the old NPLG, but is serving up parts of it 'reheated' in her new plans. After all, a lot of time has already been invested in them. In doing so, she is trying to make them a little more farmer-friendly and to work them out further, albeit with a smaller budget. This weekend, discussions were held about this new proposals presented, including extra focus on agricultural nature management and as a side effect also less nitrogen emission. Wiersma also continues to believe in things like converting farmland to nature land (often with land managers) with various restrictions on use.

Water quality and data chaos
Meanwhile, almost weekly alarm signals continue to emerge about water quality, such as this week again at the NOS, and exaggerated with the help of social media. The cause would be nitrogen exceedances at farmers, while that is not at all clear. The Dutch water quality managers almost all apply a different policy when it comes to quality assessment. Under the colors green or red (good or bad) hang almost everywhere different data and policy choices. At one water board it is: one exceedance = everything wrong, at the other it is: only one exceedance = everything good (one out, all out or vice versa). Even the national government deviates from what Brussels says about how to score water quality. Furthermore, foreign supplies, natural deviations and various domestic sources are often lumped together. To keep it simple for the uninitiated, there is fortunately one scapegoat.

Official warning Brussels
In between all the domestic troubles, this week there was also a letter from Brussels about the manure plans of Minister Wiersma. The civil servants of the Directorate-General for the Environment expressed their concerns about the series of relaxations proposed by the Minister, such as the narrower buffer zones and the intention to limit the number of nitrate-sensitive areas. They either could not wait until the new European Commissioner for the Environment had formed an opinion or they still had to pass on the opinion of the outgoing Commissioner. The fourth estate also sometimes takes the initiative itself, but there seem to be few media that take critical note of this.