Some improvements but still work to be done on RMA reform legislation

Parliament’s Select Committee has released its reports on each of the Natural Environment Bill and Planning Bill, the legislation that will replace the Resource Management Act.

Each report is more than 500 pages long and will take some time to analyse in detail but following is our initial view.

B+LNZ has been working tirelessly, with other industry groups, on getting the replacement legislation fit for purpose.

Good progress has been made in a range of areas and we will continue to push for better outcomes for our farmers. Our farmers need certainty and the legislation needs to be enduring.

What has improved

• There is now explicit recognition of food and fibre production in the goals of the Natural Environment Bill, which is a significant and welcome improvement. 
• The focus of the goals on enabling development ‘within environmental limits’ – which was creating a hierarchy – has also been removed.  
• There are now improved processes by which councils set ecosystem health limits to consider environmental, social and economic matters – however we’re not sure they’ve got things right in terms of avoiding aspirational limits (see below).  
• Controlled consents have been reinstated and improvements made to the permitted activity processes.
• The use of market-based mechanisms for allocation of natural resources has been removed. 
• They have introduced an auditable category for farm plans (so not every farm plan will need to be certified and audited) – but there’s more that needs to be done on farm plans (see below).

What still needs to be worked through

• A major concern is that the legislation states that councils must give preference to resource caps for managing catchments back to environmental limits. Managing catchments back to environmental limits is very complex and will require an iterative process. It’s important that all tools in the toolbox are available and councils are not directed to only one route, particularly if that involves irreversible change. Our experience in regional plans around the country has shown that when resource caps are used in a regulatory context (particularly around nitrogen) they are often expensive to implement, rely on very complex and uncertain models and try to control things that are often not the primary driver of the outcomes communities are after.  
• Another key area remains the framework for setting environmental limits. While the Select Committee has improved the drafting, the legislation still allows environmental limits to be established that may not always reflect what is scientifically robust, economically realistic or practically achievable. The legislation still leaves much of the detail around environmental limits to future National Policy Direction, meaning the real test of these reforms will come when those are developed.  
• The legislation mandates councils to set ecosystem limits for a range of new domains where previously limits were not required, including biodiversity, soils and coastal water. This would effectively duplicate the already complex national freshwater process for a whole range of new areas, significantly increasing cost and complexity of the planning framework for farmers, when Ministers' intent is to make things simpler. Our view is that resource management issues in most of these domains would be better addressed through other means such as national instruments.  
• Concerns about exemptions for particular activities and sectors. Infrastructure, municipal discharges and aquaculture have explicit statutory exemptions pathways from meeting the environmental limits. However, farming does not yet have an equivalent implementation pathway. We are concerned that this will effectively pick winners and could mean that our sector will have to do more to ensure environmental limits are achieved.  
• There is still not enough clarity on how Freshwater Farm Plans will be embedded within the new resource management system. It’s positive that the auditable category has been introduced but there are still issues. For example, where part of a farm triggers the need for certification, the whole farm will still need to be certified, not just to the high-risk activity area that triggered the need (eg the area of irrigation or winter grazing) meaning further costs without focusing on the actual risk. We would also like to see it made clear in the legislation that farmers should not have to do more than one farm plan.  
• Some progress has been made on stock drinking water, but it is unclear if this will be workable in practice or if it will be improved through secondary legislation.

Next steps

B+LNZ will continue working constructively with Ministers, officials and Parliament to improve the legislation before it is enacted. We’ll also continue working with other sector groups.

The Select Committee has made genuine improvements, and we acknowledge that many concerns raised by the farming sector have been heard. But the job is not finished.