NRW: Welsh Tories want the watchdog that polices Withyhedge and the Llanelli fly site scrapped

The body that rewrote Withyhedge’s permit last week, policed the Llanelli fly crisis over the summer and declared the whole of Wales in drought in July should be scrapped, the Welsh Conservatives say.

Andrew RT Davies, the party’s shadow environment minister and Member of the Senedd for Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg, has repeated his call for Natural Resources Wales to be closed and replaced, with its regulatory and commercial work split into separate bodies.

Mr Davies said: “Natural Resources Wales is unfit for purpose. It must be closed and replaced.”

The timing follows Monday’s announcement that the Conservatives in England would abolish Natural England and the Environment Agency and bring their powers under direct ministerial control. Mr Davies called it “the correct approach”.

He said the same move in Wales would remove unnecessary bureaucracy and make the people exercising regulatory powers directly accountable, and that Welsh Conservative plans to replace NRW would follow the approach taken in England.

What NRW does in south-west Wales

NRW is the environment regulator, the forestry body and the flood authority rolled into one, formed in 2013 from three predecessors. Its decisions have run through three of the year’s biggest local stories.

Last week it approved a new permit for Withyhedge Landfill near Haverfordwest, writing six metres of overfilling into the rules at a site it had ranked the worst-performing permitted installation in Wales two years running. The regulator said the law obliged it to.

In July it suspended part of AMG Resources’ permit in Llanelli, the site blamed for the summer’s fly plague, then lifted the ban in August while keeping an enforcement notice in place. Glanymor’s councillors had called for NRW’s chair to quit over its handling of the crisis.

It also declared the whole of Wales in drought at the end of July, and moved the south west into recovery last month as the rivers came back.

For and against

The regulator’s defenders say the problem is funding, not structure. In May last year the Senedd’s cross-party Climate Change, Environment and Infrastructure Committee concluded that “years of under investment have stretched NRW too thin”, and that it was already not funded sufficiently to enforce against environmental crime in Wales.

The committee said it was “gravely concerned” at NRW’s plan to attend fewer low-category pollution incidents and adopt a “higher tolerance of risk”. Its chair at the time, Plaid Cymru’s Llyr Gruffydd, said that risked “turning a blind eye to pollution incidents that, while perhaps deemed less impactful, still erode the health of our ecosystems and communities”.

It was the second year running the committee had said so. Its 2024 scrutiny found NRW “faces a significant funding shortfall, exacerbated by rising costs and grant-in-aid allocations that do not match inflation”, and that staffing was inadequate for its nature goals; the Welsh Government rejected its recommendation that NRW set out service agreements defining what it could deliver for the money.

NRW told the BBC it had to “live within the resources available to us”, and that of the incidents it attended the previous year only 5% were confirmed as having a significant or major environmental impact.

The BBC reported that NRW’s core grant from the Welsh Government had not risen while costs had, leaving a funding gap heading for £13m in 2025-26 and more than £17m the year after, that it had sought to shed more than 250 posts, and that it is still paying back a £19m advance from the Welsh Government used to settle a tax bill with HMRC over the employment status of its contractors. The final bill, agreed last October, was £14.6m plus £2.95m in penalties suspended for a year, repaid through cuts to NRW’s budget over several years.

In England the plan has drawn condemnation from the Wildlife Trusts, whose chief executive Craig Bennett is reported to have said abolishing environmental regulators amounts to “gross negligence from any party that aspires to government”, exposing homes to flooding and food supplies to biodiversity collapse.

The Countryside Alliance backed it, saying decisions about rural communities should be taken by elected ministers rather than officials.

Mr Davies, a Vale of Glamorgan farmer himself, dismissed the third sector’s objections. “It is time to stop prioritising the wishes of the third sector and start listening to those who feed our nation,” he said, adding that it was time the concerns of farmers were heard “over the quangocracy”.

The England announcement came from shadow environment secretary Victoria Atkins at a farming union breakfast at the Conservative conference in Birmingham, as the first stage of a year-long review of the department’s 34 arm’s-length bodies.

NRW is a Welsh Government body, so the Conservatives could only act on the plan by winning power in Cardiff Bay or persuading the Plaid Cymru government to adopt it. The party remains in opposition after May’s election.

Mr Davies has called for NRW to go before, and the party has said it would split the regulatory and commercial roles if it ever got the chance.

Author

Kit Peters

Kit Peters is a journalist and the editor of Swansea Bay News, covering Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire since 2020.