Talking Dirty – An Environmental Blog: The 2015 Budget.
Date: 19/03/2015 | Environmental, Blogs
A brief budget version of ‘Talking Dirty’ to review what was included in George Osborne’s budget speech yesterday that could impact the businesses in the waste and environmental sectors:
- Tidal Lagoon – is the world’s first ‘man-made’ tidal lagoon which generate power potentially on the basis of a guaranteed price by capturing the power of the incoming and outgoing tides and using the weight of the water to power turbines ‘pie in the sky’? (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-31927779);
- Environmental Crime – a one-off fund of £4.2M will be made available to the Environment Agency to tackle serious waste crime in England and Wales. This is being funded by a change in the cap on contributions by operators to the Landfill Communities Fund up from 5.1% to 5.7%. A package of reforms for the Fund is being considered by the Government with a view to accelerating spending on community and environmental projects in the vicinity of the landfill sites which contribute to it;
- Pitcairn Islands – whilst not mentioned in the speech, the published budget confirms that the ocean around Pitcairn will be designated as a Marine Protected Area extending over 834,000 square kilometres and expected to include a ban on commercial fishing to protect the rare species of fish, coral and algae.
If any of you have any views, comments or suggestions of specific ‘dirt’ that you would like to see discussed here then please get in touch – email, phone, twitter or linked-in.
I’ll be back with a non-budget blog post again soon!
