Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-106)
MR MICHAEL
ROBERTS, MR
DAVID NORTH
AND DR
PAUL BROOKS
WEDNESDAY 15 JANUARY 2003
100. I will come back to that in a second and
give you advance warning to find an alternative definition of
waste if you are criticising the current one. What really drives
this? Is it the case if there were no regulation and there were
no commercial benefit to reducing waste, it would not happen at
all?
(Dr Brooks) I think there is another element which
is governance and being good environmentalists or citizens of
the world in that sense. That is certainly a factor in our approach.
So there is doing the right thing as well.
101. You keep asking for incentives and you
criticise regulation but you are keen to have more of it when
it is going to suit you.
(Mr Roberts) I do not think we have actually said
that.
102. Bearing in mind what Dr Brooks just said,
why do not you get on and do a lot of this stuff anyway?
(Mr Roberts) If I could answer that point very generally,
I do not think we have said anywhere in our written submission
or in the oral evidence that we have given this afternoon that
we want more regulation. We have talked about the need for incentives.
Why does business not get on and do it if it is the right thing
to do? The point that we have made at some length in our evidence
is that business would like to get on and do it but in many instances
it is precisely because of the poor form of existing or forthcoming
regulation that barriers exist to businesses doing the right thing.
(Dr Brooks) On the point about incentives or penalties,
I do not think it is an incentive to penalise somebody and say
they can have some of that back if they improve; that is a penalty.
It is a penalty in the way it is designed, it is how it works.
I was going to say in terms of the balance between regulation
and whether a company has a commercial reason for doing something,
that changes over time because if in order to recycle that particular
waste you have to put in an expensive treatment process, then
there is a net cost involved. That balance does change over time.
Certainly I could show figures where in terms of the early gains
it is a commercial driver and at a later time it is a regulatory
driver, and at times there have been financial drivers through
things like the Landfill Tax as well and when you get to the bottom
end of the scale the Landfill Tax becomes the blunt instrument,
so it changes.
103. Just coming back to Mr Roberts, I thought
you were asking for further regulation in terms of data collection.
You are asking for clearer guidance and you are certainly asking
for more guidance from government. It seems to me that you have
not sorted out the kind of relationship you want with government
if there are areas where you are asking for more, and yet your
members are often the first to complain when they get it.
(Mr Roberts) You mentioned data collection, data collection
already happens, it is carried out by a multiplicity of agencies,
the Environment Agency, local government, DEFRA; the problem is
it does not happen properly. What I am saying in that particular
regard is not that there needs to be some sort of regulation to
make the arrangement work better (there are other ways of doing
it) it is about the quality of what we already do. Just to be
clear on that point, it is far from increasing regulation.
(Mr North) On the question of the balance between
self interest and the impact of regulation, those can of course
both push in the same direction and create a win/win situation.
So, for example, the green trays I mentioned earlier on, we introduced
those as a company five years before the Packaging Regulations
took effect. Nonetheless, the Packaging Regulations, one would
argue, should push in the same direction and achieve an overall
environmental benefit, in addition to a benefit for the company
in terms of cost savings. I am probably the one person on the
panel here who has made the point about the need to get the incentive
structure right and that is a good example of where we think it
is not right because what we have found is that by minimising
and by reducing waste through the green packaging scheme and extending
our green trays scheme, it actually works against us. We see it
as a perverse incentive in the regulations whereby business actually
has a perverse incentive to generate waste and to recycle waste.
What we have argued there is that the system should introduce
an incentive, in that case on business, to minimise and reduce
waste rather than simply to generate waste. Again, I think it
was me who referred to an incentive structure in terms of recycling
units in store car parks. That is something that we have done,
it is something on which we do not make a return because the return
goes to local authorities. Again, I mentioned the fact that local
authorities get £40 a tonne for doing that. However one looks
at that, it seems to us right to argue that must be a disincentive
to operators other than local authorities to become active in
that field and the question then is whether for local authorities,
looking across the country—and there are some examples of
very good local authorities—that served the interest of
achieving targets.
104. I just wonder in the last three minutes
whether you have thought of an alternative definition of waste?
(Dr Brooks) The issue of the definition of waste is
not exactly in the definition of waste, it is in the interpretation
of the intention to discard rather than the definition itself.
I have a particular issue, as most of industry will have (and
I am slightly contradicting Michael here) in response to an earlier
question of whether the 2005 target will be met because the Environment
Agency is labelling, for example, slags from our industry, which
have been used for 100 years in road stone, a waste now because
they say we have no intention to discard. The reality is we always
have had markets for this, we intentionally make the slag to get
the impurities out of the iron, but yet we have got to sell it
as a waste. That will threaten existing markets as well as prevent
further recycling. The problem is as soon as something is labelled
a waste it immediately loses value and immediately the market
is affected because certain people will not take that because
it is labelled as a waste. I have one particular example where
a product that we used to get paid £10 for we now pay £15
a tonne for because it has been labelled a waste where it was
not before. It is very much a labelling issue related to intention
to discard, so it is not the definition that is the problem, it
is the interpretation that is the issue.
105. Mr Roberts, do you agree with that?
(Mr Roberts) Yes. I was going to use the same example
about the possible change in status of ash from coal-fired power
stations which has been used for years, recycled into road surfacing
material because it is not classified as a waste. This may now
be classified as a waste and, as a consequence, will no longer
be used for the purposes it is currently being used for and be
used for landfill instead of providing road surfaces. That is
a bizarre, perverse consequence and a specific example of the
way in which the approach to defining some things as waste and
some things as not is having unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.
Mr Challen
106. It would be useful to have a written statement
on this last point because I find that rather perturbing and I
would like further information. Is that possible?
(Mr Roberts) We can expand on that particular point.
[1]
I would refer you to page six in our written evidence which cites
three or four other specific examples of the same generic point,
but we can expand on that specific issue about coal ash.
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming along
this afternoon. I am sorry we have to close the session now because
we are running a little behind because of the two votes we had,
but thank you very much indeed.
1 Please see supplementary memorandum on Ev 53. Back
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