Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280-292)
MR DIRK
HAZELL, MR
MICHAEL MORRIS
AND MR
MICHAEL GREEN
WEDNESDAY 29 JANUARY 2003
280. Is that because the directives are not
being complied with?
(Mr Green) I admit I would have to say yes. Either
they are not being complied with or they are not being understood
properly or they are being misinterpreted.
281. So the directives are in place at the moment.
(Mr Green) The Landfill Directive is in place. The
Batteries Directive is not in place, but that would clarify the
particular situation we are talking about.
282. Can you help me? Would you know when that
is coming into effect?
(Mr Green) It has been talked about for many years
and I do not know when it is coming. I believe it is on the agenda
again in Europe for this year. Whether it gets put back again
as it has been for the past four years, I do not know. That is
an example of what makes it difficult for us in terms of planning
for our business. We know that this directive may well one day
arrive and we will have to respond to that. At the moment we cannot
do any planning because we just have no idea when it is coming.
(Mr Hazell) Going back to your initial question, Mr
Green's company is unusual because he deals with relatively hazardous
materials, which are relatively expensive to manage. The evidence
your Committee had last week from BIFFA, was that once you get
to £35 per tonne you actually make recycling on an industrial
scale commercially possible. Peter Jones in his evidence was assuming
a £10 per tonne gate fee for landfill. I have to say that
we were particularly pleased, because most waste is not municipal,
that the Government accepted our recommendation that a new landfill
tax escalator should be fiscally neutral for business. We are
also very anxious indeed that we get to the £35 per tonne
sooner rather than later because at best it is going to be half
way through the next parliament and at worst it could be at the
end of the parliament after the next parliament. Peter Jones last
week made the £35 figure a very clear one. What we do not
know is whether or not the government has any model of its own
which indicates how particular increases in the landfill tax would
relate to compliance with particular stages of the Landfill Directive.
You might as a Committee be a little more successful than we have
been in eliciting that information.
283. If the £35 per tonne level is reached,
will that provide the type of environment for your member companies
to make the type of investment decisions which need to be made
for you to provide the alternative?
(Mr Hazell) Yes, it does. You are starting to look
at an industrial scale on a whole range of treatments being viable
for the municipal waste stream. For businesses like Mr Green's
it is principally important as a signal, because his rate per
tonne is significantly higher anyway because it is a specialised
waste stream. Do you want us to respond on the fly-tipping thing,
which is sort of related to your first question, or do want us
to leave that?
Chairman
284. It is coming up later.
(Mr Hazell) I shall wait until you come onto that.
Ian Lucas
285. On the landfill tax credits scheme, have
the changes proposed affected the willingness of your member companies
to support sustainable waste management projects?
(Mr Hazell) In a way, the changes which the government
have announced—in very euphemistic terms: it is slashing
the size of the scheme by two thirds—in the overall scheme
of things are actually irrelevant. They are irrelevant to providing
adequate funding for the municipal waste stream and if you take
a very macro picture, they are broadly irrelevant to everything
else. We do think it is a great pity that the Government did not
follow our advice, for example on the ESA research trust, about
channelling a reasonable amount of funding into that to try to
get things which were focused. The principal negative signal our
industry gets from what the Government clearly is going to do
with the landfill tax credit scheme, which is to abolish object
C, probably from 1 April, is that it is only a year ago that the
Government was saying the industry should put two thirds of the
money into object C of the landfill tax credit scheme and, nudge
nudge, wink wink, all will be well from 2004. Less than a year
later, what has happened is that the abolition has been brought
forward a year, it was never going to be 2003, and it is precisely
that part of the scheme which is being removed, actually for reasons
which are probably not very clear. If I were in your position,
I would be hoping that the money was going to be directed by the
Treasury rather than by DEFRA. Not because DEFRA ministers do
not have a very good grasp of what needs to be done—because
they do—but I would be a bit nervous about DEFRA officials
having too much say over where the money went.
Sue Doughty
286. We touched on the fact that we would be
coming to fly-tipping. This is really a very serious issue for
all of us because on the one hand we are talking about increasing
landfill tax and on the other hand we are already seeing an increase
in the cost of fly-tipping, people calling for tougher measures
to deal with persistent offenders. We should like your views on
this because dealing with illegal fly-tipping does form part of
a sustainable waste management policy.
(Mr Hazell) Yes, it does.
287. What are your views on the penalties imposed
on offenders at present? Do you think there are sufficient disincentives?
Do you think more can be done?
(Mr Hazell) What I should like to do is refer that
specific part of your question to Mr Morris in a minute but just
make it very clear that we are victims as an industry of fly-tipping
as much as anybody else. Regulation is the driver. When criminals
evade that regulation, they are taking money away from people
like Mr Green, who are running legitimate licensed businesses.
That is one aspect of it. As far as the regulator is concerned,
we are also in rather an invidious position at the moment because
our members are paying ever higher fees to the Environment Agency,
but the Environment Agency is actually spending less on dealing
with fly-tipping. We are victims, as are the wider public, but
Mr Morris may have views on the criminal caught, your precise
question.
(Mr Morris) There are two issues here: one is the
question of funding the regulator to be able to do the job adequately;
the second is then looking at the criminal court system as it
stands and seeing whether there are adequate powers within the
court to deal with fly-tipping and other environmental crimes.
There is a query over the resources for the Agency and it is quite
clear they struggle to cope with the fly-tipping as it currently
is, let alone how it might get worse in the future. In terms of
the court powers, arguably there are already powers on the statute
books to deal with crimes like this in terms of the amount of
fine. Magistrates' courts fines can be up to £20,000; if
a case is serious enough and goes to the Crown Court, there are
potentially unlimited fines. The amounts on the books are arguably
enough, but the issue is whether the courts are applying the level
of fine appropriate to the crime and arguably they are not. Just
before Christmas, late November, DEFRA did issue a press release
on behalf of the Magistrates' Association advertising the magistrates'
toolkit to try to educate magistrates in tougher environmental
sentences and to deliver increased fines as a proper deterrent
to protect the environment. The Lord Chancellor's Department and
DEFRA are onto the issue, but it is very early days.
288. Do you feel optimistic?
(Mr Morris) Environmental law has been an issue talked
about for the last five or six years. Not adequate finance and
it has been too slow to get going.
289. I do not disagree with what you are saying
at all. Do you feel that in spite of all the steps which are being
taken now to raise awareness amongst magistrates, because this
has a lot of bearing, everything that people say about what to
do about landfill tax, fly-tipping is the big fly in the ointment,
one might say. Sorry. The reality is that if we do not overcome
this problem, it means we cannot go forward on so many other areas.
(Mr Hazell) May I just say that the difficulty at
the moment is that fly-tipping is probably a constituency problem
which a number of members of the Committee will come across from
time to time, but it is actually something most magistrates will
only come across very rarely. We all want to have a situation
where fly-tipping, which essentially is a national problem, is
nipped in the bud and certainly well before precisely the scenario
you describe of more prescriptive regulatory standards. There
might be an argument, very precisely dealing with the question
you are raising, in addition to the announcement of guidance which
has already been given to magistrates, to try to look at having
relatively specialist magistrates who would tend to be allocated
to these cases. So you build up a body of awareness in the courts,
if people do fully understand the framework within which these
types of offences occur. They are actually much more serious in
terms of their impact on the country and in terms of their environmental
impact than a lot of lay magistrates might understand.
Mr Jones
290. Planning issues, often a frustration and
an obstacle to many people, easy to you. Specifically how and
what would you see done about it?
(Mr Hazell) The country is required effectively by
the Landfill Directive to put in a very large number of facilities
within the next decade or so and we have put specific figures
into our written evidence. A number of things unite our industry.
One thing which does unite our industry is that the current planning
system is very capricious, it is expensive and slow. We do not
think that the 85 % success figure of the Office of the Deputy
Prime Minister is actually a terribly meaningful one because it
measures numbers of applications not scale of the individual facilities.
We also do not feel that the Planning Bill is going to deliver
what our sector actually needs to help the country to achieve
compliance with the Landfill Directive. As an industry, I do not
think that our position is really all that different from any
other utility or any other activity of enterprise, except, I suppose,
in a number of respects. One is that public perceptions in the
media are not as accurate as they might be because there has been
some sensationalism about some types of facility. The recommendation
in the Strategy Unit for an authoritative official statement on
health and safety, probably cannot come soon enough from our industry's
point of view. Then at least there will be an official statement
which is reasonably authoritative, indicating that certain types
of facility, if properly operated and regulated, are safe.
291. Are you thinking mainly about incinerators
there?
(Mr Hazell) No, I am not thinking mainly about incinerators.
I am thinking about all regulated waste management facilities.
I suspect that you probably would not like to have one of any
type next door to your home. Certainly on incineration, there
has been an incredibly active public campaign based on historic
and not very accurate data, but that is not unique to incineration.
It is difficult for our members, even when they engage local public
communities, to get total wholehearted support for waste management
facilities. I think BIFFA's evidence last week made quite an important
point in the sense that we have to move forward with between 1,000
and 2,000 new facilities which are increasingly going to look
to people going past them like any other piece of kit on an industrial
park. From that point of view, the public climate should be getting
easier. We do need certain specific changes. One which would be
helpful for us would be to have permitted development rights like
other utilities. The other thing which would be very helpful at
this stage in the development of the sector in the country would
be to have better co-ordinated and significantly better resourced
Regional Technical Advisory Bodies. It is really at regional level,
and it is not at all entering into the party-political debate
about counties, it is not relevant to that, but the debate about
waste management infrastructure is probably best had at regional
level. The debate about having the Best Practicable Environmental
Option (BPEO), is probably best conducted by reasonably technical
people in the first instance at regional level and then reporting
to the mixture of officers and elected members in the regional
planning context. If you could start the debate off in regions
in that reasonably soundly based way, that would probably be at
least as helpful as the delivery unit which is planned in DEFRA
as a result of the Strategy Unit for local authorities. We certainly
would hope to see an improved role for the RTABs.
292. Are the Regional Technical Advisory Bodies
providing the best environmental options for sustainable waste
in their areas?
(Mr Hazell) Really they are trying to. They draw expertise
from a number of sectors and they are technical experts. You have
people like the regulator, the Environment Agency, planning officers,
technical representatives from the industry. What they should
really be doing is looking at how they can help as a region to
achieve the country's compliance with the Landfill Directive on
the basis of the BPEO. Once you get the critical mass of a region,
you can start to talk about BPEO in a more sensible and co-ordinated
way than you can for a relatively small local authority. You start
to get a reasonably integrated package of infrastructure. What
those bodies do need is a little bit more resourcing. We convened
a forum of industry representatives on RTABs and saw the most
widely ranging practice across the country at the moment, some
publish, some do not publish their findings. They are not really
networking as effectively as they might be, because you want all
the RTABs to be getting up to best practice across the country.
The advice we would offer is that all the RTABs need the benefit
of full-time professional support. We have tried to get the Office
of the Deputy Prime Minister to bring together a national forum.
I have to say there has been one meeting; the last meeting was
cancelled. It does not suggest that they are taking it as seriously
as we might have wished. If you are looking at ways to drive the
planning debate forward in a responsible way, which is actually
likely to reflect the BPEO and is likely to be seen in the long
run to be fair by most people who are elected to public office,
that is the best vehicle we can identify at the moment which is
available.
Chairman: Thank you very much for that very
thoughtful evidence from all three of you.
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