| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Bennett: Will the right hon. Gentleman remind the House who set up the structure? Did he envisage, at that time, that it would work in this way?
Mr. Gummer: The hon. Gentleman is right to ask who set up the structure. I feel so sour about the matter because it was not intended to work in this way at all. The system was supposed to be absolutely clear, but matrix management got in the way, as the hon. Gentleman will understand. Once people ceased to be specifically involved in doing the job, as they were when we set up the system, and once a system of matrix management was introduced in which no one was specifically involved, it became difficult to follow the costs. Matrix management may be right: it is not for me, or the Minister, to run the Environment Agency. However, if matrix management is necessary, it must provide clear accountability over spending and effective implementation of the purposes set out for it.
The hon. Gentleman is right to allow me to take pride in the fact that I set up the agency. However, I remind him that the change has been a proper managerial change unaccompanied by the kind of fiscal probity that he would expect in a Department, and that I would expect in a public corporation.
Mr. Bill O'Brien: I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Mr. Bennett) that the right hon. Gentleman has some responsibility in this matter. I served on the Committee that set up the Environment Agency. At the time, we reminded the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues that its structure lacked proper resources or manpower. The result is that
too few people now have to do more jobs. The right hon. Gentleman should review the current situation, because he is responsible for it.
Mr. Gummer: I do not want to disagree with the hon. Gentleman, but that is sheer nonsense for two reasons. First, we are talking not about a lack of resources but about a situation in which the fees should fully cover the cost of doing a job, and, if they did not, the Environment Agency could put them up. That has nothing to do with what the hon. Gentleman says.
Secondly, I was about to deal with the question of staff numbers. When the Environment Agency was set up, it had 9,000 employees. Part of the plan was that that number should be reduced--by contractorisation, by going out to other organisations, by becoming dynamic within the system--to about 5,000, because it was too big an organisation to be run effectively.
There were no plans to reduce resources or people. The intention was simply to organise the agency in a way in which it could be properly run. It was not for the Government to lay down how that should be done, merely to say that they wished the agency to move in that direction, because it was too big. However, the numbers have gone up: the agency now employs 11,500 people. The hon. Gentleman cannot say that there are too few people--there are more people employed now than there were when we set it up. In many ways, the agency is able to tax, in effect, to meet its costs.
The present resources were provided not by the previous Government, but by the present one. I was not going to complain about those resources, but the hon. Gentleman tempts me into a party political position that I do not hold in relation to the environment. I believe that our job is to get it right, whichever party we are in. I was not going to discuss those issues, but if the hon. Gentleman wants me to do so, I have a better answer than he has on that subject.
I return to the non-party position on which I wish to speak. I can talk on this subject without difficulty, because it involves money coming from industry at a rate determined by the Environment Agency, which advises the Government on the way in which it should be levied. The Government recently announced changes for which the agency asked. I do not happen to agree with those changes, but there we are. That is how the system works. The people who pay the money should know where it is going. They feel strongly that everyone should be involved and we feel strongly as a society that people ought to be committed to our environmental programmes. They cannot be so unless they know how the money is spent.
The remarkable and distinguished Baroness Young is to become the chief executive of the Environment Agency and I wish her well. I am a little surprised that she is prepared to take on that tough job, but she will do it extremely well. I say to the hon. Member for Normanton (Mr. O'Brien) that if that is not a non-party political comment, I do not know what is. Baroness Young has performed distinguished public service and is not afraid of speaking independently--even though she sits as a Labour peer.
Baroness Young faces a formidable job. I hope that she will make greater use of those outside the agency so that she has a more compact agency to run. I hope that she
brings real improvements in morale so that people feel that everyone is pulling together. I hope also that, out of matrix management, she makes a more simplified and sensible structure to enable the rest of us and the agency to understand what is going on. Those are difficult things to do and they are easy for me to say, but I would be the last person to tell Baroness Young how to do the job.The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish referred to landfill, which is not the answer, rather the interim one. The finding of better answers ought to be an intrinsic part of the work of the Environment Agency. I declare an interest, in that I help a company involved in tyre recycling. I respect the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish very much, but I must tell him that tyre recycling is not as simple as he suggests. People have to pay for their tyres to be recycled. If there is a company that collects tyres and takes them away for free, it is doing a remarkable thing that none of us has heard about before. There are examples of the universal fly-tipping of tyres; people who rent land and buildings from farmers, get paid to take tyres away, put those tyres in the landfill, fill the buildings and then disappear, leaving farmers with buildings full of tyres for which significant sums have been paid. We have seen companies set up, with Government or City help, to try to recycle tyres. In almost every case, those companies are no longer in business and we have a serious recycling shortfall. I do not blame the Government, but their proposals on recycling tyres rely on many companies that are no longer operating. We are in a worse position today than a year ago--not because of Government action or inaction, but because the private sector has discovered that money cannot be made out of that industry. The Government must take action, and the Environment Agency must help.
There is a thing called the tyre recycling committee at the DTI. That committee is not widely known, which is not surprising because it does not do very much. It has produced five reports; again, that is not widely known. I do not believe that many people have read them. Remarkably, the membership of the tyre recycling committee, which includes tyre makers and tyre retreaders, does not include a single tyre recycler. The reason for that is simple: the tyre makers and retreaders are interested in a system that does not charge them for the job of recycling.
The Government should take a tough decision and say that it is the responsibility of the producers to ensure that they pay for the products which they recycle. That is the principle behind the packaging regulation. It is a cross-party principle; we introduced it in government and the present Government have continued to adhere to it. Why does it not apply to tyres? How can we have a tyre recycling committee which does not include people who could explain the realities of the business? I suspect that the matter has not been subjected to the pressure that we should have put it under.
Mr. Rowe: My right hon. Friend may take some consolation from the fact that the Government have set themselves very high targets for the use of recycled paper, so there is at least a report recycling mechanism in place.
Mr. Gummer: For the report to be recycled, someone must find it. That is another problem.
The principle of producer responsibility must be enhanced. If that is to be the case, the Environment Agency must play an important part in ensuring that it
works. I wish to emphasise that part of the report; the need for the Environment Agency to play a bigger part in helping the Government to legislate properly in these areas. That is urgent because soon we will not be able to put whole tyres into landfill. We will have to find ways of chopping them up and some tyres--bus and truck tyres--are very difficult to chop up. We are not there yet and we need to get there. By 2006, we will not be able to put bits of tyres into landfill.I wish to refer to the effect on the Environment Agency and Britain of our membership of the European Union. The idea of an environmental policy which is not a European policy is batty. The things with which the Environment Agency deals are all, of necessity, things with which Europe has to deal as a whole. We export half of our air pollution to the rest of Europe. In return, we receive half of its air pollution. We cannot deal with pollution other than on a Europewide basis.
I wish to refer to the Environment Agency's concern about the cleanliness of water. There is not much point in cleaning up our seas by cleaning up the outflows of Britain if the Elbe and the Rhine are pouring filth into the water from the other side. We need a common policy on water. Also, a very large number of our birds are migratory. If the Spanish drain their marshes and the Italians shoot those birds, we will not get them.
Some of the most Euro-sceptical of thinkers have a limited geographical knowledge. I often wonder whether they think that this country is nearer to the United States than to the rest of Europe. Environmentally, we must be serious and say that we can only make progress from a common basis. What is more, we can prove it. Anyone who thinks that water standards in Britain would be what they are at present if it were not for our membership of the EU does not know the history. The reason why, at long last, our water standards are comparable to those of our neighbours is because we had to sign up for that--against the views of the industry and others. Those who are enthusiastic about privatisation--as I am--have to admit that we had to privatise because it was the only way to obtain the money to make the changes that had so lamentably been lacking while the industry was under state control.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |