Environment Minister Serge Wilmes has presented amendments to the nature conservation law, designed to speed up procedures and introduce the principle of "silence is consent" in environmental matters.
Wilmes explained that it would kick in for renewable energy projects in the green zone, for the destruction of biotopes, for the construction of housing in urbanised zones and also for the creation and restoration of biotopes in the green zone. That, he said, is where the silence-equals-agreement rule will come into play.
It explicitly does not apply, however, in national nature conservation areas or in Natura 2000 zones, the minister noted. Ideally, no more than six months should now pass between an application, for example to the Nature and Forest Agency (ANF), and the authorisation. That window is split into three months for the administration to check whether the dossier is complete, and a further three months for it to take a decision. These are maximum, hard deadlines, the minister said, but public officials may very well make decisions faster.
If the administration fails to respond within those windows, the file is deemed complete and admissible, and the authorisation is taken to have been granted. Should the administration notify the applicant on time that the dossier is not complete, the applicant has six months to provide the missing information, after which the two three-month windows start again for the administration to review and decide, making for a 15-month procedure in total. A further six months can be added on top if the applicant requests an extension, for example to commission a study.
Wilmes claims that the goal of the ministry and its administrations is to avoid reaching the point where the silence-equals-consent rule even needs to kick in. That, he said, is why rigorous deadlines have been set. The administrations themselves consider these timeframes realistic.
A key element is digitalisation, since the entire procedure is being moved online, the minister noted, alongside internal reforms aimed at standardising and then harmonising the various procedures.
ANF deputy director Carmen Weisgerber said the agency had managed to cut the average processing time for requests in the first quarter of this year from 200 days to 110, compared with the same period last year. There is still room for improvement, she conceded, but a near-halving in a single year is remarkable.
The new law also sets out clearly which documents must accompany the various applications, of which there are between 3,000 and 4,000 a year. The minister explained that 56% of files were now processed in under three months and 78% in under six. Six months is the limit set by law, he added, which leaves 22% of files still over that threshold, and that is where major efforts have to be focused.
He reiterated that his ministry's efforts are all in order for the silence-equals-agreement rule to never have to come into play. Asked whether there might be legal risks if two similarly stored files were treated differently because of the rule, the minister returned to the same point, that ideally, it should not come to that.
