Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540
- 562)
TUESDAY 14 DECEMBER 1999
MR IAN
BONAS AND
MS PAMELA
CASTLE
Mr Brake
540. How would you ensure that industry views
were not over-represented if you are talking about adding additional
industrialists?
(Ms Castle) If some issue came on to the agenda which
had a specific interest for a particular industry, then to co-opt
somebody from that industry would be very useful. It would give
added weight to the REPAC and lend itself to very informative
discussion.
Chairman
541. Can I ask fairly crudely, do people turn
up?
(Ms Castle) For attendance?
542. Yes.
(Ms Castle) They have since I have been Chair.
543. Is that general across the board, that
attendance is quite good?
(Mr Bonas) Yes. As far as I know the other REPACs'
attendance is quite good.
Mrs Ellman
544. How should the REPACs be linked to regional
chambers or regional assemblies in RDAs? Are yours linked?
(Mr Bonas) We have very little resource. We meet four
times a year. We have a REPAC, we do not have any permanent staff,
there is no secretariat, there is no ability to deal with things
which are going on on an ongoing basis week by week. The most
we can hope for is that a member or some members of a REPAC will
also be on a regional assembly or be on an executive. Formal links
probably are not going to work. We can advise the Agency, and
that is a containable thing to do. As soon as one suggests that
we should also be advising regional government, it would not be
a much bigger job but you would have to recast the REPACs into
some different animal to be able to do that. I would not say it
is impossible but you would have some substantial restructuring
to do.
545. Going back to the answer you gave to the
very first question on who do you feel accountable to, does that
mean that you see your role as looking nationally, not looking
at the area in which the Agency is operating?
(Mr Bonas) No. I think we are very much concentrated
on our region. We are a body of regional people who have interests
in the region.
546. Do you find conflicts at any stage between
what is being said nationally and what people in a particular
region feel is required to happen in that region or locality?
(Mr Bonas) Conflicts do occur, yes. We are pretty
interested in pursuing those where we find them.
547. Where would you place yourself in a conflict
of that nature?
(Mr Bonas) On the regional side where it is sensible.
To give you an example, at Whittle Colliery the water was rising
in an abandoned mine and was going to flow over the top. The legislation
provided that the Agency should do something when there was some
pollution but in advance of there being some pollution, although
you could see the water coming up, it did not have a duty to go
and do anything about it. Our attitude to that kind of thing is
to say "well, stuff the legislation, let us get on and do
something". In that case the Agency did proactively do something.
They found a means of dealing with that, buying the site I think
it was,[1]
putting the money in that was required to contain the situation
before there was an environmental catastrophe. That is one kind
of example. Another one is Blue Circle Cement in Weardale wanted
to burn some horrible fuel in their furnaces. The Agency would
have had a duty normally to say "according to our scientific
rules of this and that, you can burn it, it will not pollute"
but there was a tremendous hoo-ha locally and out of that was
invented, actually suggested in our REPAC, the idea of a selected
licence application. We used to call it a contentious licence
procedure. Where you had got something contentious locally the
Agency would not just apply the rules but would consult the local
population according to a detailed and extensive regime, holding
public meetings and getting people, as was described previously
by Kay, who were responsible in the room together. That procedure
is now being instituted and adopted across the Agency as a whole.
Chairman
548. But in that particular case of burning
the waste materials in the cement kilns, did it actually end up
with the local population being happy with the process going on?
(Mr Bonas) As far as I remember it, it was withdrawn
by the company concerned.
549. So they were very happy.
(Mr Bonas) It frequently happens that way, that when
the company realises the local feeling, and after all it draws
on the local population to draw its staff and employees, it has
to live there and be there, companies will withdraw themselves
anyway.
Christine Butler
550. Do you have a web site?
(Mr Bonas) As a REPAC? No, we do not.
551. Would you favour wide dissemination of
your advice to the Environment Agency through those means or through
regular slots on the local media, including radio, etc., regional
tv? Would the Environment Agency be prepared to pay for that or
would it not want your advice published?
(Ms Castle) I have been in quite detailed discussions
with Thames Region because I am very keen to get the message out
to the public that the REPACs exist and what their role is. We
are in discussion, and I am certainly not finding any reluctance
on the part of the Agency about this, to publish the minutes of
the REPAC meeting, to have our own web site, to actually publicise
when REPAC meetings are going to be held to get more people to
come to them. I think that would be a very healthy development.
As far as I can make out the Agency are not reluctant about that
sort of proposal.
552. You will know that there have been so many
complaints about the inconsistent advice offered by the various
regions in the Environment Agency, and indeed inconsistency within
the regions depending which officer is giving it. What do you
attribute this to? How do you think that we can remedy it?
(Mr Bonas) It is attributed to some extent to the
whole principle of having an Agency which is trying to integrate
a number of different functions. You can either leave it separate
and have an HMIP and a Rivers Authority, or whatever it was, as
separate things, in which case you get a high degree of consistency
across regions within, say, HMIP, or you can try to organise the
Agency by geography and say "we will have regions and each
of these regions is supposed to provide an integrated service".
If you try to do both you must have some kind of matrix management
which, by the way, we feel is ready for some review, getting into
all of the detail of that. It was created some time ago and I
think it is time that it was revisited and updated to make it
faster, cheaper, better. A lot of work needs putting into that.
If you have an Agency which is organised regionally and if the
regions have some measure of autonomy, there are going to be some
inconsistencies. We, operating within one region, tend not to
see it too much because we are not cross-regional. We hear about
it a bit but it does not seem to be a huge problem. I am not aware
in my region of any instance where jobs have been lost, companies
have been shut or seriously disadvantaged or there has been serious
environmental damage either as a result of this kind of inconsistency.
It certainly irritates people and it is annoying but I do not
think it is a really fundamental thing.
553. So do you support a fully integrated Agency
with better matrix management? When do you think this might really
come to fruition?
(Mr Bonas) I wish I knew. It is getting there. It
has been a considerable achievement to set the Agency up and do
what has been done. One can of course criticise it, as one can
criticise anything, and I would be the first to do so, but it
should be recognised that it has been a considerable achievement
and it is making advances. I remember when somebody who is sitting
around this table came to talk to the Chairmen's Conference about
two years ago and we talked about going for outcomes rather than
activities, in other words the Agency should be aiming to achieve
the environmental outcomes rather than simply measuring the number
of inspections. Looking back, progress is being made. Of course
it is not as fast as we would like and we get frustrated.
Mr Brake
554. Do you have a good relationship with the
Regional Flood Defence Committees?
(Mr Bonas) Yes. Some points have been made and also
referred to this morning about flood defence and conservation
and wider areas. Can I say that I think there is a case for a
review of the whole committee structure of the Agency. In our
region there are eight committees for the regional and area staff
to refer to, that is four AEGs, one REPAC, two flood defence and
one fish. This is just too many. It would give any staff indigestion
to have to refer to eight committees. There is a clear case for
a review and, if you felt like suggesting it, I would be the first
to support it.
Chairman
555. That is a cop-out, is it not, a review?
What would be the real answer, to hand the whole lot over to the
regional assemblies?
(Mr Bonas) I have a view as to what a good structure
would be. I would not say it would be the only good structure
but if you want me to suggest it, it is one that you could kick
around. Yes?
556. Yes.
(Mr Bonas) I would have a regional advisory board
that met monthly instead of quarterly, that was properly staffed
and properly resourced and did a mixture of what is currently
known as the RAP and the REPAC but did it better, so to speak.
In each region I would then have two or three AEGs which also
did fish and flood and included fish conservation and recreation
and all of that. I would abolish the present flood and fish totally,
absorb them, if you like, into a structure. That would halve the
number of committees roughly and make them much more focused.
I think it was being suggested earlier that flood defence ought
to be part of the executive structure of the Agency. You could
do all of that at once. I would not say that was the only structure
but it is one.
Mr Brake
557. If I can bring you back to the more specific
question of the Regional Flood Defence Committees, assuming that
new structure is not put in place. What ability do you have to
influence the Flood Defence Committees?
(Mr Bonas) We sit on them as individuals. I sit on
two in Northumbria and Yorkshire. We do speak up.
558. Are you heard when you speak up?
(Mr Bonas) Yes. Not always as effectively as one might
like. There is a tremendous problem with flood defence, in funding
flood defence, and as climate change goes on we are really concerned
about this. If we carry on having more windy, wet episodes there
is going to be a serious crisis with flood defence funding and
you are not looking at a few million either, you are looking at
very large sums of money. We are extremely concerned about that,
I do not know what planning is being done about it or what thoughts
are being given to it.
Chairman
559. I thought we were being involved in managed
retreat. I am looking forward to Stockport-on-Tees.
(Ms Castle) It might be Stockport-under-the-Sea.
Mr Brake
560. Can I move on to the question of waste
management issues. Do you think the Agency should have more influence
over planning both in relation to the siting of waste management
but also homes on flood plains?
(Mr Bonas) This is a really serious issue and it is
a complex issue. Just one of the small points is if it is published
that somebody has got a house on a flood plain you could affect
their value, so one has to be careful how to deal with the information.
Clearly it is a nonsensical situation that building can go ahead,
sometimes against Agency advice, in a situation where the money
is not available to build the right flood defences. A suggestion
as to how to deal with this, rather than give flood defence the
veto which brings it into areas that it perhaps would not be best
advised to be in, is to lay down that, if requested by the Agency,
the Minister should call in that sort of decision where there
is an objection by the Agency for a review and let the Minister
decide because he can have the confidential information which
might damage people, without publishing it, review all of the
issues, jobs, local needs, is this is the only place left to build,
what would flood defences cost, who is going to fund it? He could
take into account all of those sorts of issues when he takes a
decision.
561. And perhaps hold ultimate responsibility
when everything goes wrong?
(Mr Bonas) That might be quite a good idea. I was
being flippant.
(Ms Castle) I think it is grossly inefficient for
the planning system and the waste licensing system to be running
in parallel because not only very often in the application does
the potential for environmental damage arising from the waste
management side not get aired in the planning process but also
it is inefficient and costly for the applicant to actually go
through two different procedures, especially if we are talking
about the selected licence application procedure where consultation
will be made with the local population. The applicant will have
gone through all the planning side and then will have to start
again with the waste management side. It seems inefficient and
ineffective.
Chairman
562. On that note, can I thank you very much
for your very refreshing comments.
(Mr Bonas) Thank you. May I send you my regional annual
report?
Chairman: By all means, I would be very pleased.
Thank you very much. Thank you to the Committee.
1 Note by Witness: The Coal Authority were encouraged
by Ministers and the Agency to buy adjacent land and take corrective
action. Back
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