About the Manual

This manual is intended to provide a complete account of EC environmental policy, complete in the sense that all the many items of environmental legislation are being covered. It does not claim to provide a complete account of British environmental policy. Only that part of British policy that is relevant to the implementation of EC legislation is included, but that part is now large and not many areas of policy have now been left entirely untouched by the EC even if the depth of EC involvement remains uneven. Some fields, such as the control of hazardous chemical substances, have largely been defined by EC policy. Others, such as pollution of air and water, while profoundly affected by EC concepts, retain distinctively national characteristics. In contrast, town and country planning which plays such a central role in the protection of the environment in Britain has so far been much less influenced by the EC, the most important incursion to date being the Directive on environmental assessment of development projects. As EC policy comes to touch more areas of British policy, or to touch them more deeply, this manual will in time come to provide a fuller account of British policy.

The manual grew out of an earlier book first published in 1984 under the title EEC Environmental Policy and Britain when there was much less legislation. An enlarged second edition was published in 1987 and reprinted, with postscripts, in 1989 and 1990 in order to keep pace with the steady volume of new EC legislation. The demand for information about this growing volume shows the need for a format that can be regularly updated. I have nevertheless tried to preserve some of the characteristics of the original book which was intended to shed light on how policy in one country was being stretched by that extraordinary effort of collaboration between a number of countries that we know of as the EC. When I began work EC influence was only just beginning and EC achievements were limited. Now it cannot be repeated too often that it is impossible to understand the environmental policy of any of the EC Member States without understanding EC environmental policy. At the same time the EC enables the Member States to play a role on the world stage which individually is beyond them just at a time when global issues are being forced by circumstances onto the political agenda. In 1984 I said that it would be by the test of its ability to deal with global issues that EC environmental policy would eventually come to be judged. The time for applying that test is now coming closer.