Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-232)
COUNCILLOR KAY
TWITCHEN AND
MR GRAHAM
TOMBS
WEDNESDAY 12 MARCH 2003
220. The only way to deal with this problem
is to institute a reward system, so that if someone turns in somebody
else for shoving green bottles into the brown botte bin, he can
ring up on his mobile phone and the police will be round. That
caller would be rewarded. I was surprised you did not put fly-tipping
in the anti-social behaviour statement that David Blunkett has
just been making. Everything else is there, why not fly-tipping?
I went down to my local waste station on Sunday. I do not normally
go; I leave it to my wife. She took me. I think there is a chance
there for a great social occasion. You could merchandise it as
a great grand Yorkshire day out. Folk were driving down in their
cars; they all sat and chatted and looked at each other's waste
and asking, "Oh, can I have that?" There were two old
jokers from up the road picking through it and taking suff home
with them. One of them came along with a thermos flask. This is
a social treat. We could encourage it by saying it is a social
occasion.
(Cllr Twitchen) We do. Our civic amenity sites are
very popular. We have just opened a new one on Canvey Island last
August. If any of you want to see a really super, wonderful civic
amenity site, then I recommend it. You will find outside that
site an ice-cream van at weekends.
221. That was not what I was supposed to ask
you. How are we going to divert organic household waste from landfill?
(Cllr Twitchen) There are two sorts. One is green
garden waste: that is nice and clean. If you take it to the civic
amenity site, the Council will compost it and sell back the compost.
We are then substituting home-grown compost for raiding the peat
bogs in Ireland. Environmentally, that is win, win, win and that
is great. The only trouble is that what is increasingly happening
is that green garden waste is passing through the hands of the
local authority when it never used to. A lot of councils will
do specific green garden waste collections. They may charge for
that or do it for nothing. That is introducing into the municipal
waste stream waste that in the old days people just kept in their
gardens. They either composted it or they stuck it in the heap
at the bottom of the garden, but it never came anywhere near the
council. One of the reasons councils are doing that is something
Graham Tombs touched on earlier, that we have our recycling targets
and those are weight based. We are required to recycle so many
percentage of our tonnage as at 1997. Green garden waste is nice
and heavy. If you take that away and compost it, you are going
some way to meeting your statutory recycling targets in a fairly
economical way, but what you are actually doing is taking waste
from gardens which should never have come out of those gardens
in the first place.
222. You want them to compost it at home?
(Cllr Twitchen) Yes. That is the most environmentally
friendly way of dealing with it. We have almost created an artificial
market. One thing the LGA has asked for in the Waste Not, Want
Not document is another look at those targets to make them
material specific. It makes it more complicated but we have a
target for green waste composting, a target for cans, a target
for paper and so on. Then you will start to get local authorities
collecting, for example, plastics which are very light, so we
do not bother too much collecting them at the moment because they
count for so very little in our weight-based targets. If we had
material-specific targets, then we would direct our attention
more towards the aluminium—very recyclable—and certain
types of plastic—very recyclable. It is not looked at in
isolation but relative to the other recycling activities we do.
The other sort of compostable waste is kitchen waste. Here we
hit the brick wall of the Animal Byproducts Order, with which
I am sure you are all familiar. Basically that is to prevent the
transmission of disease from meat-based products in the kitchen
to farm land. You have to break the chain somewhere. We are still
waiting for a resolution the Animal By-Products Order. We are
waiting and waiting and waiting. We have composters uncertain
how they will have to deal with collections in the future. They
cannot get the infrastructure in place; they cannot apply for
licences. You have local authorities wanting to do these separate
collections; they cannot go ahead because they do not know whether
anyone is going to be able to use the stuff once they have collected
it. The one thing that would help us more than anything else to
get on with this movement is a resolution on the Animal By-Products
Order. I know you are hearing from the Composting Association
later. Technically, they will be much smarter about that than
I am, but it is a real problem for us at the moment.
223. That is because they will not make their
minds up. Why is there that delay?
(Cllr Twitchen) We are not allowed to take kitchen
waste and compost it in the normal composting process because
that compost may not then be used on agricultural land. You have
to break the chain. You have to compost it in a vessel at a high
temperature; that is very expensive. We do not want to have to
do that unless we have to. We need clear word from DEFRA on how
they are going to implement that Animal By-Products Order.
224. In general terms, what should the Government
do to promote composting, both at home and on the part of the
local authority?
(Cllr Twitchen) The suggestion in the Waste not,
Want Not report is that that will be a specific drive, that
home composting will be promoted very heavily. I am very pleased
about that. You do not, though, just give people the bins and
hope that they will get on with it because it does not work that
way. They do need to be taught how to do it. They need to be encouraged.
The message needs to be reinforced, otherwise you just end up
with a sloppy mess and you do not ever bother to do it.
225. That is true. Do you do it yourself?
(Cllr Twitchen) Oh, yes, of course I do.
226. How about promoting it with local authorities?
(Cllr Twitchen) Yes, Essex promotes it. Local authorities
the length and breadth of the country sell subsidised compost
bins; they give people instructions on how to do it. It is a very
popular service that we provide. We often fail to follow up with
the education. Somebody gets the bin and they are all enthusiastic
and they try it and it does not work and they say, "I am
not going to do that again". The bin is still there, so statistically
they are still composting, but in practice they are not; they
are taking it all to the civic amenity site.
(Mr Tombs) One of the factors that could also be considered
is that there is home composting but there is also a move towards
municipal composting where materials are put into land-row or
vessels, and other technologies as well. One aspect of this whole
business, whether it is compost or other materials, is a very
clear understanding of the markets and the market opportunities.
If a grade one compost can be produced, there are very good markets
for that, competing markets. It would help certainly, especially
if that compost were to try to replace the peat substitutes, if
some sort of added incentive in the pricing mechanism could be
applied to the municipal type compost produced to give it a cash
advantage and really to persuade householders that when they go
to their local, out-of-town store or garden centre they should
buy that in lieu of some of the primary products that they would
normally pick up, which are peat-based. That is about quality
and quantity. It has been demonstrated that that can be achieved
but of course it then has to compete in a very open market. That
aspect can sometimes have an effect on the saleability of that
particular material. Certainly that should be considered as part
of that process. We also need to have clarity. You mentioned the
alterative technologies. We spoke about anaerobic digestion, for
example. We still await clarity on how that by-product, the digestate,
the compost, that comes out the back end of the plant will actually
be classified in the UK in relation to its future use, whether
it can go straight to landfill, to farm, et cetera. Clarity is
important on that.
David Taylor
227. Just a few miles away from the Essex border
lies the largest incinerator in the UK in Edmonton. I know you
are here from the LGA and not from Essex. I do not know if Essex
has any of its waste products incinerated there?
(Cllr Twitchen) No,
(Cllr Twitchen) You said earlier on in your evidence
that some authorities choose to go down the incinerator route
and some do not. Do you understand the concerns of people who
live in the windward side of incinerators, the concerns about
dioxins and other waste products?
(Cllr Twitchen) I absolutely do. As a local politician,
I completely understand those concerns. I do not think they are
always well founded. We have more dioxins thrown into the atmosphere
and therefore descending upon us on 5 November every year than
the total output of all the waste incinerators in the UK for a
whole year. We do to ourselves and our children more damage in
one night than the whole waste industry does to us for a whole
year. It is not always entirely logical. The other matter is that
the level of dioxin permitted and the levels of many other gases—but
concentrate on dioxin because that is the one that is most commonly
feared—have crashed through the lowest imaginable barriers
in recent years. They have been reduced and reduced and reduced.
One of the problems with a modern waste incinerator is that it
is very difficult to measure the dioxins because the amounts are
so small. You cannot do continuous monitoring because there is
not enough to measure. You have to do sample monitoring, which
people regard with suspicion. The reason you have to do sample
monitoring is because there is not enough to measure as it is
coming out of the chimney.
228. Waste management companies still find it
incredibly difficult to get planning permission, do they not?
(Cllr Twitchen) They do. There are fears. There are
also concerns about the fact that if you have an incinerator,
you do not need to bother about recycling; you just throw everything
in it and it just withers away and you do not need to try to recover
the extremely recoverable resources. I think that is ill-founded
but I can understand it. I always point these people to Kirklees
Council, which is Huddersfield, which has a waste incinerator
right in the centre of the city, right by the river. They have
transfer stations around the city and all the waste comes in to
that one point. They have a percentage of composting which I think
it is somewhere around the 23 to 25% figure. They have a materials
recovery facility for all their dry recyclables and an incinerator
designed to take at current volume a fraction under 50% of their
waste. That incinerator is built. It will only take 138,000 tonnes,
or whatever it is, a year. As their wastes volumes go up, which
they do inexorably, they cannot throw more into that incinerator
because it will not take it. They have got to divert more and
more and more. That is a very good example of an incinerator with
which the local people are happy; nobody ever complains about
it. Nobody did complain about it at all because in that part of
England they are used to chimneys and things and they are not
frightened by them. It is designed only to deal with the residual
waste. It challenges them to do more and more composting and diversion,
more and more recycling. It can work in environmental terms very
well. You are absolutely right; it is not what most people want.
Our job as local politicians is to try to deliver what people
want us to deliver. If that means no incineration, as far as I
am concerned, they get no incineration.
229. You used a vivid picture of local government
being an animal that is slow on its feet. Is that because it is
a wholly owned subsidiary, a domestic pet, of central government
that is poorly fed, with three of its legs tied together, and
if it shows any independence of mind, it is put back into a leaking
kennel?
(Cllr Twitchen) I do not think that is fair. I think
I explained why sometimes we are seen as being slow on our feet.
We are not always free to be as innovative as we would like to
be.
Paddy Tipping
230. You have been very supportive of Waste
Not, Want Not I think. Is there anything that is not in the
report that you would have liked to have been in the report? This
is the wish list again.
(Cllr Twitchen) I should be supportive because the
Local Government Association was good enough to allow me to be
on the Advisory Panel, so I had an input. I have no excuse for
being dissatisfied, but it is of course a report to government,
not of government. Clearly what is going to matter is the government's
response to it. The sooner we get that, the better. I gather it
is going to be out just after the Budget. It calls for a range
of measures that I think will take sustainable waste management
in this country a big leap forward. As far as I can remember,
it is silent on one of the key issues as far as the LGA is concerned.
We feel that waste management suffers slightly from being overseen
in Government by DEFRA, by the ODPM and by DTI. I would like it
all to be located in one place. We think it sits within DEFRA,
and also of course the Treasury, but we cannot expect DEFRA to
pull the Treasury's strings. We would like all the decision making,
all the policy making and all the regulatory functions, the whole
lot, to be put together in one body, which then would develop
real expertise—there is a lot of expertise there at the
moment—and really take responsibility with clear political
leadership. I think local government and the waste industry as
a whole would find it much easier to work within that framework.
231. I think that is an important point, that
in a sense there are two conceptual issues there. One is that
you are asking for leadership from the Government. I heard you
saying earlier on that it is all about local accountability and
letting us do things in different ways. How do we match this up,
the direction from Government and allowing your local authorities
in a sense to do their own thing?
(Cllr Twitchen) That is what local authorities are.
Our accountability is to our electorate. We should be free to
respond to what we think our electorate needs. What works in Kirklees
would not work in Essex or Suffolk or wherever else. It is a matter
of having a department which is going in to bat for waste management,
not the local authorities, that is not afraid to engage with the
European Community on emerging directives. We do it in local government.
We spend quite a lot of time engaged through the CMR, with the
Commission, on waste management issues. We would like the Government
to be more active and proactive in that arena. We would like more
vision. People have got to stop what they have been doing for
years and treating waste as rubbish just to be got rid of; they
have got to start regarding it as a resource, which is what it
is. We would like to see some more up-front political vision on
this.
(Mr Tombs) If I may add to that, I think it is also
about having some clarity and consistency in that direction. I
do not have to think back too far to when we were looking at the
packaging regulation, for example. I still recall the opening
statement written by the then Minister that said: "Only industry
has the vision and the power to—" Local government
was not included in that initial shaping. Twelve months into that,
there was a realisation that local government had to be involved,
but by which time, of course, certain mindsets had been established.
We have bounced around in how we have applied the approach to
packaging. We are now, ten years down the line, starting to get
some coherence and consistency in that approach. Much of that
has been brought about by the likes of WRAP, for example, ten
years ago. It did not need not rocket science to join that up
at a more strategic level. Waste management is always going to
have a very local dimension because it affects every single household
in England and Wales and throughout the UK. There is always going
to be a local dimension. It is not like water or gas. Also, it
is socially dependent on individual households, their understanding,
willingness and preparedness to take part and to change what they
are doing by their behaviour and they way they react. There is
always going to be that very local dynamic that must be taken
into account. The cohesive framework within which that is set,
the Government framework, the way that we can join up the relationships
between local authorities, the waste industry and the regulators,
is vitally important. That element of Waste Not, Want Not from
our perspective needs to be pursued very quickly because we are
running out of time to meet these new directives. We are threatened
with penalties under various Bills if we do not perform. We are
still not getting coherent, joined-up, strategic thinking. Local
authorities in the middle are being told one thing and being pulled
one way and yet they are having to respond to very local community
concerns and meet those concerns.
232. I suppose the final message is, as you
have just made it: get on with it now. You have the report on
the bookshelf; you had better do something about it.
(Cllr Twitchen) We had Waste Strategy 2000,
which went a long way but not far enough. We had a year-long review
and then we had the report issued in the dying days of November
last year. We are still waiting for the Government's response.
There were comments in the Waste Strategy Review 2000 that
everybody agreed should be enacted and they have still not been
enacted three years later. Could I crave your indulgence for 30
seconds? I am a member of the board of WRAP—Waste Resources
Action Programme. I took the precaution of reading their evidence.
There was a certain dialogue about nappies, disposable and otherwise.
I have brought you an example. We are ahead of the game. This
is a modern, reusable nappy. It is not a square of terry towelling.
This liner is the bit that you throw in the washing machine or
give to a nappy laundering service. It folds very easily and it
goes in there; you put the child in it and seal it up with velcro.
The whole thing is washable and very light and environmentally
extremely friendly. You can put a paper liner in to collect any
solids which go down the loo. It is made of cotton. I will pass
it round. I did want you to know that reusable nappies are not
grotty, old-fashioned things with pins. They are lovely clean,
modern and user-friendly.
David Taylor: Can we place on record the Committee's
appreciation for the clarity, enthusiasm and imagination of the
LGA's evidence. To correct Councillor Twitchen for the final time,
she said that she was lucky to have the post of responsibility
at Essex; I think that is wrong and they are lucky to have you.
Chairman: If I may say so, David Taylor does
not dish out many compliments. Thank you very much.
|
