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Offshore Chemicals (Amendment) Regulations 2011

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his robust explanation of these regulations which are clearly important in terms of environmental sustainability in the north-east Atlantic area. I want to explore the Ospar agreement a little. It is very important to us and will be critical in carbon capture and storage, which I shall not go into this afternoon. I am interested to understand how we are doing this to comply with a decision by Ospar. Do decisions by contracting parties to Ospar have to be unanimous or are they by qualified majority voting? What incident brought to the attention of the Government the fact that the previous legislation was defective in some way? Listening to the Minister’s explanation, I was surprised that there has to be this difference between a discharge, and I have already forgotten what the other noun was, but never mind. Will the Minister confirm that other contracting parties to the Ospar agreement—the Explanatory Notes mention the harmonised mandatory control system—are fully complying with that decision, as we are attempting to do?