Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
DR ANDREW
SKINNER, MR
MARTIN BROCKLEHURST
AND MR
ARWYN JONES
25 MARCH 2004
Q80 Chairman: Could I ask quickly about
waterways. Your memorandum said there was a particular problem
with waterways and I think Defra have said the same thing. We
are all familiar with the old swansong about bedsteads in village
ponds. Why is there a particular issue with waterways? What are
you doing about it?
Dr Skinner: First, waterways,
be they rivers or canals, particularly in urban areas, are obscure
and inaccessible places that have not been used or accessed very
much. All that is changing, of course, because one of the glories
of inner city development is the way in which canals/rivers are
being made more accessible. In many urban areas, the price of
new accommodation on the banks of the canal is at a price which
20 years ago would have seemed absolutely flabbergasting. So that
is changing, but there is still a history of canals and rivers
being inaccessible places where not many people go, and they are
therefore seen as prime sites for illegal disposal. Because they
are waterways, there is a wider impact, both in terms of environment
and public health, because toxic substances or even non-toxic
but polluting substances can dissolve and flow in with the river.
Thirdly, there is an issue about drainage. An accumulation of
bedsteads, trolleys and pressure cylinders from gas cylinders
can actually be a flood risk. Because we are a flood management
agency, we are a water quality agency, we are a waste regulation
agency, it touches our business in many more places than does
disposal to land. It is an issue for all those reasons and one
to which we therefore have to give good attention and certainly
British Waterways identified it as one of their prime problems
in terms of amenity of the waterway and in terms of the usability
of the canal system.
Q81 Chairman: Presumably local authorities
have a major input into this as well.
Dr Skinner: Yes, absolutely.
Q82 Mrs Clark: Let us take a cultural
look at things, perhaps. Antisocial behaviour—that very
phrase—and fly-tipping are hitting the headlines more than
ever before, not only nationally but more properly locally. You
say there has been a change in this prominence in the Government's
eyes over the past 12 months or so. Is this coming from governments,
local authority and the agency or is it actually responding to
public demand?
Dr Skinner: I think it is a complex
issue. There certainly is a reduced tolerance from the public
and from landowners in terms of the issue and the use of land
and the damage to amenity. When we quote pollution incidents,
we are actually quoting public reaction to damage of the environment.
We do not have a huge police force of environmental inspectors
over the country; our police force is the general public. They
are the people who ring us up, and we mobilise quickly, depending
on the scale and threat to public health and the environment.
When an issue is going up, in terms of reports that is a measure
of how it is perceived as well as how it is seen. Indeed, one
of the reasons why we so much want better data is because you
can get noise in our information—because if we run a campaign,
as we sometimes do, jointly with local authorities and the police,
then the issue is raised in profile and we get more reports, so
it is hard to unravel. Undoubtedly there is greater public concern
and less public tolerance of fly-tipping or illegal waste dumping.
We are also pushing the issue. We were pleased to get involved
in debating with government in the Antisocial Behaviour Bill because
it was an opportunity to bring the environment issue into a piece
of legislation that was primarily about social issues—and
that is important for us because we do not think the environment
should be in a little bubble with its own little legislative toolkit.
The fact that we have had excellent dialogue with the Home Office—indeed
some of our staff have been seconded there for periods of time
to help work this up, because it is a social issue as well as
an environmental issue—we thought that was a very positive
step so it had our support. So there is push and there is pull.
Q83 Mrs Clark: Is it not fair to say
that there has been a bad time-lag between the general public
expressing concern and action actually being taken? Why is this?
Is this because it has been almost embedded into the system; that
people are used to nothing being done so it becomes almost culturally
acceptable? It is okay to put your supermarket trolley in the
lake—as we have in Peterborough quite a lot.
Dr Skinner: There is acceptance.
It is very clear to us as we are going about our job that a little
bit of illegal dumping can easily lead to a lot as an area becomes
almost accepted as a place where this might happen and where people
are not concerned. Certainly when we have been involved in clean-up
operations—and these often relate to watercourses because
of our other duties on drainage and flood protection—we
have been very keen to keep the environmental quality of that
particular area maintained because it does not stimulate a repeat
of action. People seem to be reluctant to throw the first black
plastic bag, but if one goes and stays then the car and the construction
waste and the hazardous materials may well follow.
Q84 Mrs Clark: In your memorandum you
very much put an emphasis on catching them young, catching them
at a vulnerable time, children: education, education, education.
You are talking about environmental citizenship. Is this really
going to help, so that if we get them young and make them responsible
then they will not do it? Or is this a very, very naïve view?
Are the pressures outside in society just too great and are we
just kidding ourselves?
Dr Skinner: We did say that but
we did also say that it was not exclusively relevant to the issue.
I do not think we see this as a youth culture issue as it relates
to the hazardous end of the illegal waste dumping market. It relates
to attitudes which lead to the degradation of environmental quality
of an area, which then makes it a place where the more hazardous
wastes that we are more concerned about are attracted. So it is
an issue about education but I do accept that it is a small part
of a complex problem.
Q85 Mrs Clark: You have mentioned before
about antisocial behaviour. I was actually on the bill stage of
that committee. I personally think there is a problem with the
phrase "antisocial behaviour". Why do we not use the
phrase "environmental crime"? Or why not just "crime"?
Dr Skinner: We do use the word
"crime" and we do use the word "illegal" and,
as I said in my opening remarks, we would much rather and do talk
about illegal dumping rather than fly-tipping because we believe
that has the right connotation in terms of the motivation and
the impact. Fly-tipping is a word which does not carry that. Antisocial
behaviour was a bill developed by the Home Office. We were pleased,
for the reasons I mentioned, to be invited to respond because
of the link we see between environmental crime and other forms
of social injustice, but in our business and in our publicity
and consultations we do not play heavily on that issue for the
very reason you have said: it does not carry the gravitas
about the nature or the motivation of the issues.
Q86 Mrs Clark: In terms of the safety
of your staff when dealing with these issues, do you find offenders
are increasingly resorting to violence or—just as worrying,
perhaps—the threat of violence?
Dr Skinner: That is the case and
it is a concern for us. Indeed, it was discussed by the agency's
board yesterday. But I will ask my colleague Arwyn Jones, who
is the enforcement manager, to describe that in more detail.
Mr Jones: Thank you. Certainly
that is the case. Certainly since 2000 we have noted an increase
of about 25% in the reported events of threatening or intimidating
behaviour against our own staff. In the last 12 months there have
been 128 reported cases on our own safety system. The vast majority
are burglary but within that there are some very serious physical
assaults that have occurred on our own staff, even where our own
staff have been followed home and assaulted in their own premises.
Fortunately they are rare, but they are there, and although the
trend overall is quite modest over four years—
Q87 Mrs Clark: Is it increasing?
Mr Jones: It is increasing, but
what is increasing more is the number of serious assaults on staff.
That is clearly something we have taken very seriously and we
have begun to put measures in place to improve the protection
of our own staff, both within our own procedures and also through
putting in place better working relationships with police to support
staff. We have even had one incident within the last few months
of a member of our own staff having to have 24-hour police protection
for a period of some weeks.
Q88 Chairman: Where was that?
Mr Jones: That was in the North
East.
Q89 Chairman: How does an issue like
that get resolved?
Mr Jones: By working through with
an interest in the whole case. When it gets to that kind of stage
we clearly need to involve the police to help us with the investigation.
Once the police get involved, sometimes the issue can be diffused
a little, because the police clearly are seen to carry more authority
than ourselves. We are not a police force, we do not pretend to
be, but, equally, as we deal with the more serious end of crime,
the characters we are dealing with are actually involved in other
forms of criminal activity as well with which the police are more
familiar. We certainly see that in fisheries offences and crossing
over into waste offences, but also people are known to the police
to be involved in theft of construction plant, for example.
Q90 Mrs Clark: You clearly welcome the
consultations of Defra. Any surprises in the documents—or
all what you were expecting? Are you expecting anyone to lobby
against any of the agreed proposals in the consultations? Are
you pleased? Did it get the thumbs-up from you? Is there anything
which you wanted to see in there which is not in there?
Dr Skinner: We welcomed the consultation.
It contains a lot of good sense. We were pleased to see a lot
of the ideas that we have been developing from our own experience
incorporated. We have yet to go through the fine detail. Probably
the only point I would mention—and it relates very much
to the discussion we just had—is the very good support we
get from the police when we are in serious issues but perhaps
a little bit more difficult as issues are developing, and we would
like to see some of these issues being made more reportable offences
so that they are actually loggable by the police force and they
can count them as activities in which they should be involved.
I think that would be very helpful to us. It may actually help
to diffuse some of the more serious incidents getting as bad as
they are if we could count on earlier involvement of local police
services. We do have very good cooperation, but, like everybody
else, they have resources and priorities and we think that would
put it up their priority list. That will no doubt be one of our
responses to the document, but, broadly, we welcome it, and we
think it is a very positive way forward. It will give us and local
authorities extra armoury which we would need and welcome, although
one has to say that all these good ideas imposed upon businesses-as-usual
funding will fall short of expectation, and, therefore, I associate
all that with my remarks earlier about the comments we have made
and you have kindly supported in terms of extra resources.
Q91 Mr Thomas: If we can develop a little
bit around the consultation and the current arrangements as well.
First of all, I understand there is a protocol that deals with
this between yourselves and local authorities.
Dr Skinner: There is.
Q92 Mr Thomas: Is that a protocol between
yourself and individual local authorities or worked out between
yourselves and the Local Government Association (LGA)? Does the
fact that we have a consultation on statutory guidance point to
the failure of protocol at the present arrangements? If so, where
does that failure mainly happen?
Dr Skinner: The protocol is a
longstanding arrangement—well, as longstanding as the Agency—which
very shortly after the Agency was formed in 1996 we developed
with the local government through the LGA (and there is a parallel
process with the Welsh LGA) and it was because illegal waste dumping
was a live issue then and needed collaborative arrangements. That
has worked in principle well, but patchily, I think would be a
fair description, and some of the comments earlier would underline
that. One of the reasons why the original protocol was perhaps
less effective was that it was not as clear about who did what.
What has now emerged as a commonly held view about the division
of responsibility needed to be clarified. But also, because circumstances
vary very much locally, there was a recognition that if we made
the thing too prescriptive it may actually just not hit the button
in some particular area. The new protocol, which is in a very
advanced state of discussion and will be supported by statutory
guidance if procedures go—which would be welcomed though
hopefully not something which is widely needed—is a document
which is clear about the basic principles but also involves procedures
for local discussion, so that at local level the Environment Agency,
local authorities, police, other campaign groups can work out
their own arrangements. I think that is a step forward. It sets
some national principles which would be endorsed effectively by
the secretary of state but recognises that it is entirely proper
for them to be local arrangements. That will be a stronger protocol,
based on the experience of five or six years of use.
Q93 Mr Thomas: How may the public perceive
this? I can see how you as the Agency and local authorities can
perceive of the difference between fly-tipping and organised disposal
of waste or more than one van load, but the member of the public
just sees items that should not be in the place that they are
in. That is it at its most simple. Is there not also a concern,
if you have this protocol and statutory guidance but also this
local flexibility, that if there are some local authorities which,
perhaps for resource reasons, are not feeling particularly up
to it, they may think, "Well, we have a little problem here
but let's wait until that problem gets nice and big so that the
Environment Agency deal with it rather than us." Are there
not some difficulties here? I suppose I am approaching it from
the point of view of why there has to be more than one body dealing
with illegal disposal of waste. If it is illegal and it is waste,
then over to you, or over to the local authorities—it does
not matter who—but why have a two-pronged approach when
perhaps a dagger would be more effective?
Dr Skinner: It is a question of
scale. Many of these issues are very local and they are about
local community involvement, local self-help. There are many excellent
examples where community groups have been the driving force, who
have changed perceptions and expectations in an area, who have
tackled the issue of the first black bag that I described.
Q94 Mr Thomas: That is not universal,
is it?
Dr Skinner: It is not universal
but there are good examples. I would like to see more. I think
that is very much in the remit of local government. It is not
what we are staffed to do. We are happy to help where appropriate
but, as we described, we are talking about many issues where the
crime is organised, the scale is big, the people are moving between
different forms of environmental crime and organised crime. They
are dealing with red diesel one day, into construction waste the
next day and fisheries poaching on the third day, they are operating
over a wider area, and it is pretty difficult for the local authority
and even sometimes the police force to cope with that scale. The
rationale behind the division of responsibility is based upon
(a) our statutory duties, (b) our scale of operation, and (c)
the accumulation of experience that we have jointly gained. But,
of course, sizes are all different sizes, and they meet in the
middle, and that is where the local arrangements and the shared
practice—
Q95 Mr Thomas: It is about that meeting
in the middle that I wanted to ask you. I can well understand
the large-scale approach. I can understand your views. I can also
appreciate at the lower end of the scale—you referred earlier
to the high end of the market and we are now at the low end of
the market—if you have a proper approach in terms of public
education, accountability and awareness, then you can deal with
a lot of those problems without enforcement action. But there
must be a middle ground where you do have small builders who dump
here and dump there or where it has been known for businesses
not to be too hot on how they get rid of their packaging and things
in the past as well. Are you confident now that the consultation
and the new worked out protocol will deal with that and we will
not find this awful thing that happens with public bodies—and
I am not particularly putting you in this any more than any other
public body—of buck-passing, of: "That's not our problem,
it is somebody else's problem"?
Dr Skinner: First, there are sufficient
examples of excellent practice of working together—local
authorities, police, ourselves, others—to convince me that
the issue you are describing, the sort of demarcation dispute,
the transition area, can be dealt with. There are plenty of examples,
Birmingham, London, Swansea, where there are good examples and
many more besides. We are saying that where arrangements are not
working as well as we would like, and if they persist in that
way, we will try our best, but we are going to stick to the high
end of the market (to use the phrase I started with), and we will
have to leave local authorities to deal with what they have agreed
to deal with and stand by the consequences of the information
that comes through on the database about what they may not have
done. We do not have the resources to range right across the pitch.
For reasons I have explained, I do not think that it is appropriate
we should anyway. We will be setting procedures to be more clear
to our own people about what we do, where we do it and where we
help do it. The protocol underlies that in some significant detail.
I think it is a positive step, based on experience. I am optimistic
that it will work better. It will not work perfectly, but the
power of the data that we have collected will enable us all to
see the issues and deal with them better.
Q96 Chairman: But there are grey areas.
I know from my own constituency experience that there is room
for confusion.
Dr Skinner: Yes, there is.
Q97 Chairman: Take, for example, a single
field which has been occupied by travellers, who have been there
for several weeks and the council has attempted, using the tortuous
processes available, to move them. They go. They leave behind
a few tonnes of building waste, hardcore and stuff like that,
as well as a lot of more squalid material, and yet there is in
that circumstance some doubt as to whose responsibility it is.
Of course, in the end, it is the landowner's responsibility to
get rid of it, which strikes many people as being very unfair.
Could you comment both on how you see your involvement in a case
like that and also on whether or not you share the view that it
is unfair that the landowners end up paying the bill for other
people's waste.
Dr Skinner: I will ask Arwyn to
elaborate. Based on the experience we have of these cases, which,
I agree, are more common than we would like, the legal position
is that it is the duty on the landowner. It is easy to see how
that is perceived as unjust but it is also easy to look at the
situation that would arise if it was a call upon the public purse
to deal with all these issues all the time. You described a situation
which occurs in rural areas but we also have it in urban areas
and we have lots of issues about not even knowing who the landowner
is. So it is a really complicated issue. Yes, there are situations
where there has to be debate between the agencies to try to work
out what is the best way forward, but, in the case of the protocol,
the sort of description you are making of a site would not be
a situation where the Agency would normally expect to be involved
or active.
Mr Jones: The particular example
you have described is probably one of the most difficult for both
ourselves and the local authority to deal with, in terms of transient
offenders. The best examples we have had in the organisation is
where we have worked in close collaboration with the police, because
getting the offenders' identities clear and being able to track
the vehicles is a real issue, because using powers to maybe seize
the vehicles until the owner is established is quite difficult
because they have moved on before you can actually get there.
The best way we have found is actually to work very closely with
the police and the local authorities and ourselves, but, by and
large, I would actually endorse Dr Skinner's comments there that
it would be more of a local authority issue but we are quite happy
to help and support and particularly to help if we know that those
groups are maybe travelling around and moving across local authority
boundaries.
Q98 Chairman: For most people it is very
strange that it is so hard to track these people because most
of the vehicles have large mobile phone numbers printed on the
outside of them. They are in business.
Mr Jones: They are. If I could
comment on that, we actually have processes in place now within
the Agency, within the constraints of the Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act, to access that kind of subscriber information. But
with a lot of those numbers it is not immediately obvious which
telephone provider the subscriber is using. It can actually take
several weeks, in our own experience, to go round all the telephone
providers to pin down the numbers, and quite often they are pay-as-you-go
so you do not often get very far with that either. They are probably
one of the most difficult parts of the community who are engaged
in that kind of criminal activity to track and pin down. The police
themselves have difficulty in actually dealing with them and we
suffer from that as well.
Dr Skinner: You are talking about
some of the most intractable problems in public order. Although
I acknowledge that these are issues which show there is lack of
clarity, it is not unique to the issue of illegal waste, and all
enforcement authorities find these very difficult situations.
I would emphasise that there are lots of areas where the arrangements
are working very well and, if more of that best practice could
be followed, I think we would see good progress from the protocol
we have.
Q99 Chairman: You do not have any specific
proposals that you are canvassing with government in order to
improve matters?
Dr Skinner: We are advocating,
with the agreement of the Local Government Association, the procedures
which are included in this quite detailed document which deals
with circumstances and issues and legal responsibilities
and support responsibilities, the sharing of information. As I
say, there are many examples where it is done very well.
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