Background Nitrogen
PAS reporters caught between promise and legal sieve
About three years after they became nationally known as a group, the roughly 3.000 PAS reporters are still waiting for their case to be settled. Carola Schouten, the then Minister of Agriculture, had made a political promise in the previous Rutte cabinet to solve their problem. Under her successor Christianne van der Wal, the current outgoing minister for Nitrogen and Nature, they still have to go through the legal sieve.
The group of PAS reporters is not themselves to blame for the legal limbo they have ended up in since mid-2019. The successive Rutte cabinets and its ministers have agreed on this, at least externally. PAS reporters are companies and entrepreneurs who reported to the government for the Nitrogen Approach Program (PAS), for example of an expansion. However, they did not have to apply for a permit for this, a notification of the calculated nitrogen load was sufficient. Due to a ruling by the Council of State, they still had to have a permit. The result of the ruling is that PAS reporters are still in violation if the report made is carried out. This has brought them into great uncertainty through no fault of their own.
Promise degenerates into wrangling
The government has investigated how it can help the companies in question, but this has never been done politically. According to recently published government documents of the Ministries of Agriculture (LNV), Infrastructure and Water Management and the Interior, among other things, because agricultural interests lost out to those of aviation and at other times during construction. Schouten's political commitments apparently no longer played a role. In the new cabinet, which had taken office at the beginning of 2022, other matters played a role and the PAS file also remained on hold for a long time. According to a recent letter from Van der Wal, a generous politically motivated fulfillment of the promise has still not been chosen.
Legalization program as an outcome
All reports made are put through a complicated legal legalization program, in which it is not certain in advance whether the PAS reporter will actually be legalized. Legalization depends on an undisclosed set of criteria. According to the latest state of affairs 259 reporters are already dropped because they do not meet the criteria mentioned. This number can get even bigger. Although this is not in line with the political promise, a small caveat is appropriate. There is a discussion about the size of the group of PAS reporters. LTO and other groups count with a larger group than the Ministry of Agriculture does. The agricultural sector believes that companies that had already expanded before the entry into force of the PAS (the Interimmers) also belong to the group. LNV sees it differently. However, the current legalization program does not seem to focus on this.
Klaas van der Horst
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