Planning Applications for Intensive Poultry Units

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:41 pm on 8 January 2019.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:41, 8 January 2019

Well, I thank Joyce Watson for that question. She will know that, as a result of the concerns that she and other Members have raised here in recent times about the growing number of applications and granted applications for development in the poultry sector, action has already been taken to make sure, for example, that larger intensive units are closely regulated by Natural Resources Wales in accordance with the requirements of the industrial emissions directive. 'Planning Policy Wales', which was published by Lesley Griffiths in December, drew particular attention to the need for local authorities to, as Joyce Watson suggested, make sure that the cumulative impact of such developments—cumulative in the sense that they create a number of different environmental challenges, but cumulative in the sense that a growing number of them close by has an additional impact on local communities—is taken into account.

But, as Joyce Watson says, there is a series of strands of regulation that need to be drawn together here not simply in the environmental field, but in animal welfare as well, and that's why the result of a chief planner's letter to local authorities and others is the work that I set out in answer to Russell George's original supplementary question.