Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 383)
TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER 2000
MR STEPHEN
TINDALE AND
MR MARK
STRUTT
Mr Olner
380. Some rises there on electoral suicides,
as well?
(Mr Tindale) There are a number of local authorities
around the world that have gone in for this, and, again, a number
of them have made it work, including a number in Southern Ireland,
so I think that the British Government should be looking more
positively on those experiments.
(Mr Strutt) Can I also say that the most successful
schemes have seemed to be those ones where there has been some
degree of contact between the collector of rubbish, or waste,
and the household. I live in Lewisham, and Lewisham has recently
begun separation of waste by giving us a green box to put paper
in, but there has been no guidance as to what sort; can I put
cardboard in there, I do not know, I have not been told. I chucked
a telephone directory in there, when we got a new one, the other
day, and it was left in there, so I gleaned from that that we
are not supposed to put telephone directories in. That is, I think,
a way of not achieving the best rates that are possible, much
better rates are achieved where teams of the collectors actually
have personal contact with the households and encourage them to
do that; quite labour-intensive, but also very good for employment,
I think. Can I also say that separation is, as you have heard
before, from the sound of it, very important, but the other side
of the coin is markets, and I think the Government has a role
to play in making sure that markets for recycled materials are
more stable than they are currently. If I make a comparison with
incineration, local authorities, as you know, enter into long-term
contracts with incinerator operators for guaranteed amounts of
waste at guaranteed cost, and I wonder if there is not a role
for Government in bringing about a similar situation with recycled
materials.
Chairman
381. The two of you are pretty critical then
of the Government's waste strategy: what went wrong with it?
(Mr Strutt) It is entirely the reliance on incineration
as the backbone.
(Mr Tindale) I think two things went wrong with it.
Firstly, the Department of Trade and Industry continues to push
incineration as a renewable energy source, which we disagree with,
for the reasons I have outlined, but which has led to an unwillingness
by the Government as a whole to be anti-incineration; and, secondly,
the Treasury was not prepared to put enough money into giving
local authorities the money to set up a recycling infrastructure.
382. Do you think the Department of the Environment
did not do enough, or do you think the Department of the Environment
was blocked?
(Mr Tindale) I think the Department of the Environment
would certainly have liked to do more on the recycling side; as
any spending Ministry will tell you, they could have done more
if they had been given more money by the Treasury. And I think
that the desire to keep the incineration option open came partly
from the DTI but partly, it would be fair to say, from DETR not
having the courage of its convictions, in a way, when it came
to meeting the Landfill Directive, and saying "We'd better
keep the incineration option open, just in case we can't get recycling
up to the levels that we want to." We think that they should
have the courage of that conviction and go for it.
383. And do you think that Ministers got the
quality of political advice they should have had?
(Mr Tindale) Probably not, on all occasions, no.
Chairman: On that note, thank you very much
for your evidence.
|
