VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER with MP Oliver Letwin

New session is largely a charade

BLACK Rod has issued his sonorous summons. The Queen has been, spoken and gone. Her speech has been debated. And the new Parliamentary session is well under way. Of course, this year it is largely a charade.

With an election likely to start not more than four months away, the chances that much of the legislative programme will become a statutory reality rather than a political debating-point are slim.

But, even in this strange after-life of the 2005 parliament, there are issues being discussed which will have profound impact in particular corners of our national life.

Example number one is the fate of micro-hydro schemes in our mill streams and rivers. Beneath the noise and clamour of the surface warfare, a little but crucial submarine battle is being fought.

The issue is whether conditions imposed by the Environment Agency on people who want to operate micro-hydro turbines will make it possible and attractive for such benign forms of electricity generation to be installed — or whether the licence conditions will make this form of generation economically unattractive (and indeed virtually impossible).

“What?” you may say, “we thought the Environment Agency would be gung ho to have carbon-free renewable energy of this sort installed up and down our river systems.” And so you might well have thought.

But it turns out that the Environment Agency is not really, or in any case, not completely an “environment” agency. It has thousands of people dealing with rivers and hundreds of people dealing with fish (very rightly) but it hasn’t yet quite caught up with the idea that we also place some environmental premium these days on renewable energy. So the battle continues.

Example two is completely different. This is a battle that is going on in a shaded area of the forest rather than under the waters. It is the battle of the herbalists.

For years, herbalists have learned how to provide safe herbal remedies on the basis of centuries of experience.

But the EU in its wisdom has now decided that only officially regulated practitioners may prescribe more than a tiny number of herbs that can be bought over the counter.

Because the system of regulation has always been operated by professional bodies rather than by statutory bodies, it doesn’t count for the purposes of the Directive — so the battle is now on, with the herbalists desperate to be officially regulated in order to survive. Strange old world, isn’t it?