Select Committee on Environmental Audit Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-118)

DR ANDREW SKINNER, MR MARTIN BROCKLEHURST AND MR ARWYN JONES

25 MARCH 2004

  Q100 Mr Challen: ENCAMS have suggested that local authorities could do a lot more to tackle environmental crime within their existing resources. I am wondering if you feel that criticism might also apply to the Environmental Agency.

  Dr Skinner: We can get a bit smarter on certain areas of our work. Certainly the protocol that we have been describing and the tasks set out in there have been drawn up and are being turned into operating practice in order to make the best use of our resources and the databases that we are talking about, which we are developing, will also make us more efficient.

  To that extent I accept the challenge but the scale of the increase in activity, the scale of the activity in environmental and public health risk, the scale of the increase in expectation is not commensurate with the improvements that I would expect to see from those kinds of measures, so we will fall short. Indeed, the Government have accepted this in their response to your last report, so I think it is common currency that this is an issue which is under-resourced. As always we will work to make sure the resources we have got will be used most effectively and better data and better partnership arrangements are key to that.

  Q101 Mr Challen: From your point of view it would be more resources and not more powers that you need at this moment in time to deliver the targets?

  Dr Skinner: The Anti-Social Behaviour Bill will deliver additional powers to us and, more importantly, to local authorities. As I have already indicated, there are some issues which we will be dealing with in our response to the consultation document. It is an issue of capacity that is primarily our concern.

  Q102 Mr Challen: I understand that the LGA are quite keen on having a £300 fixed penalty notice for failure to have the relevant duty of care paperwork at hand, waste transfers and whatnot. I was brought up on a diet of Steptoe and Son and it seems to me that that would never have existed if it was burdened with all this regulation so, instead of putting stuff out for the rag and bone man, people would just chuck it out anywhere. Do you think that we are overburdening this informal recycling sector with regulations and waste transfer certificates and heaven knows what else that we do not know about?

  Dr Skinner: It is difficult to deal with issues without some kind of structure because the way that the Agency feels that we should tackle the problem of waste is from cradle to grave, to use that phrase. Where there is not information about where waste is coming from, where it is going to, who is abusing it, who is misusing it, where it is going back into beneficial use, it is very hard to manage the waste cycle. Because a lot of it operates in the area of small business, it is very difficult to see how you can co-ordinate that without some form of tracking, which is what you have described. It does not have to be that burdensome, particularly when we can apply new technologies to it in terms of registering and such like. My answer is I feel we have to do this and that to lessen that kind of regulatory structure which would actually exacerbate the problem that we now face.

  Q103 Mr Challen: It puts the emphasis on regulating waste rather than saying how can we encourage the recycling of certain materials.

  Dr Skinner: We do encourage it, and that is in place. Within the whole strategy that we are working to, that Defra is working to, it is about beneficial reuse where possible but in order to plan that you have to have the information.

  Q104 Mr Challen: Are you keen on registering waste carriers?

  Dr Skinner: Yes, very.

  Q105 Mr Challen: How would that work out in practice?

  Mr Jones: The registration of waste carriers is already a process that has been in place for some time. What we have noticed since that legislation has been in place is a gradual decline in the numbers of carriers who are registering. What we need to do, and what we are doing, is undertaking campaigns to understand why people who originally registered then drop out of the registration loop. What we are quite keen on is to make the registration identification accessible and visible so that carriers of waste are carrying and displaying the disc and for there to be penalties in place if they do not. That would actually make it more visible and clearer that people are authorised carriers of waste and easier to track those who are not. We also believe it would be easier if the vehicle itself was registered rather than individual. That would make it easier to reconcile the information that the other agencies hold, like the Vehicle Inspectorate.

  Q106 Mr Challen: Is that not devising a system which is catching the horse after it has bolted? I do not understand how this is going to work. If somebody is driving a vehicle that does not bear a certificate, how are you going to be able to monitor that vehicle?

  Mr Jones: What we do at the present time is we participate with the police and the Vehicle Inspectorate in some of the roadside checks that they do periodically and if it is a vehicle that is a carrier of waste, such as a tipper-truck, we will ascertain with the police, or we will ask the police to ascertain is it a registered carrier and we can verify from our own database whether it is registered and current or not. We also undertake spot checks on vehicles going into landfill sites to see whether they are registered. It can be done through a series of spot checks.

  Q107 Mr Challen: Will this not create more bureaucracy and not actually achieve anything? Will you get more prosecutions out of it?

  Dr Skinner: We will get more prosecutions but, also, this kind of official process gives empowerment to individuals to take responsibility for their own part of the waste cycle. If you go to your local paper you may well find some very attractive offers for skips and our message is if a waste deal looks like it is too good to be true, it is probably illegal. There is an issue here about all of us having responsibility for waste we generate and for putting it into legal processes. If there were more controls and more visible controls, as we have described to you, then you as a private individual could be more sure that you were entrusting the rubble from your extension to a responsible source.

  Q108 Mr Challen: Will it be self-financing? Will it lead to more people being employed in the prosecution of offences and the detection of offences or is it really just going to take out people from other areas of work?

  Dr Skinner: The registration of carriers scheme is a charging scheme which generates income which the Agency uses to promote the practices I am describing.

  Q109 Mr Thomas: Can I just come in on this point. There are two aspects to this. If you are going to have a more robust system, in your view, there is a part of the waste stream that is actually very variable, as I think Mr Challen has referred to. When I got rid of two dining chairs recently I did not put them on the dump, I did not take them to the civic amenity site, I gave them to a local charity that refurbishes furniture. I do not know if they have got a waste transfer certificate but I know that as a charity I would not want them to be burdened and feel that they could not do a task like that. The second aspect of it is on the legitimate business, if you like. I have just been talking to two car dismantlers in my own constituency who have just got certification from yourselves with regard to the End of Life Vehicle Directive and it has cost them tens of thousands of pounds in each case, but they are concerned that there are still people in the area who claim that they can deal with abandoned cars. Have you got the resources, either through this method or any other method, for dealing with those who are undercutting legitimate businesses but also to ensure that there is protection for those innovative parts, which tend to come from the voluntary sector, dealing with waste streams?

  Dr Skinner: The Agency's aspiration with all these regulatory regimes is a level playing field which means that we would like to have the ability, and increasingly will have, to make sure that legitimate traders who get their permits are not disadvantaged by others undercutting them. It is the same with the carriers, the same with the skip operators, and it will be with end of life vehicles. The whole issue of levelling up the playing field for the regulatory community is very important to us. There is no reason why the charity side should be disadvantaged because in the process that you have described your chairs were not waste.

  Q110 Mr Thomas: They were waste as far as I was concerned.

  Mr Brocklehurst: Concerning the registration of carriers, registered charities are exempt from that process. Safeguards have been built into the system.

  Q111 Mrs Clark: Bearing in mind your evidence in the last inquiry we had on sentencing powers, can I assume that you are very enthusiastic about the increased sentences proposed in the consultation we have referred to and, in particular, the removal of the defence of ignorance and acting under orders? Do these suggestions fit the bill or are they not enough?

  Mr Jones: They do. They are proposals that are very much welcomed and we are pleased to see them. There are some other suggestions that I think we would like to make and will respond to the document in the consultation in fuller terms. We also submitted from the last session the supplementary evidence to you on corporate offences which we want to put into Defra's thinking at this time as well. We particularly welcome in the Defra consultation the research that they will do to better understand the motivations for why people are committing fly-tipping offences, environmental crime, and that way we will know, and I think we mentioned this last time, that just a fine in its own right may not fit and some other kind of punishment may be more of a deterrent for them. We welcome that research and we hope that will lead to a best practice guide, as the consultation suggests, on the types of actions to pursue to best deter people from committing these offences to start with.

  Q112 Mrs Clark: What sort of dialogue are you going to be having with Defra about how best to deal with construction demolition and excavation waste? To what extent is this a major problem only in the South East? Is it set to get worse with all the new homes that we will see being built in and around this area? For example, in my own constituency we are having a lot of key worker homes being built in the very near future.

  Mr Brocklehurst: Construction and demolition waste is a big issue for us. The real challenge that we face is that when companies are involved in developing sites, that they have actually got and have thought through a rational disposal plan for the materials they are going to produce. One of the issues that is in the consultation paper is this idea of a waste disposal plan for major construction activities. We are now engaged with the Department of Trade and Industry and with the construction industry in drafting what that best practice would look like and there is considerable enthusiasm for this approach. The logic for that is if you take the Thames Gateway, which is the biggest brownfield redevelopment site in Western Europe, if we continue along the line that we currently adopt then for any contaminated land that is found, the traditional approach has been to dig and dump. We now know from the changes in co-disposal for hazardous materials that there will be no landfill sites in London for that type of material, there will only be one in the South East of England and we expect that to be full by 2005. There are possibilities still for what we call mono-cells on existing landfill sites to be worked through and there may still be some facilities in that area but what this is going to mean is a radical rethink of how you develop brownfield sites and having a waste management plan as part of the development becomes crucial. There are decisions to be made as to how material is treated and handled.

  Q113 Mrs Clark: So it is planned as part of construction rather than "oh, what do we with the mess at the end?"

  Mr Brocklehurst: Absolutely. The traditional approach of dig and dump is not sustainable in the long-term. The other options that are available are to treat the contaminated land in situ or to treat it ex situ rather than simply removing it from the site. The technology is there to take that approach rather than to simply dig and dump it somewhere else. This is a big issue. A waste disposal plan, best practice, thinks the issue through in advance rather than trying to deal with the end product. The other issue that we have made an important point on is the responsibility for the disposal of the waste needs to rest much higher up the hierarchy than it currently does. At the moment it is possible to pass on your duty of care responsibility to the sub-contractors who are involved in removing the waste, but we believe that responsibility should rest with the site developers and the site owners. That would then tie in with the proper waste disposal plan for the site.

  Q114 Mr Thomas: Just a couple of questions about how this now impacts on the individual because in this inquiry we are really looking at changing the individual's ways of behaviour, that is what we are trying to get at, how we can achieve that. Just looking at your quite attractive little leaflet here under "Where you live", you say, quite plainly, "Report environmental crime, such as pollution incidents or fly-tipping. Call the Environment Agency hotline on", and I will read it into the record because any publicity is good publicity I would have thought, "0800 807060". Is that the only number that a member of the public now needs to report any type of fly-tipping, illegal dumping, whatever, because we have touched on this protocol but that does not matter to the public, what they need to know is a simple reporting mechanism? Are you confident that represents a simple reporting mechanism?

  Dr Skinner: Yes, it does. It is a number that operates in the whole of the United Kingdom. If you ring it in Belfast it will get through to the Agency's counterpart in Northern Ireland. We have effective relationships in our control centres to make sure that we can pass this information on to other agencies where relevant. Obviously local authorities have their own numbers and when people know them and use them and it is relevant, that is fine, but this is a longstop which has been in place now for six years and is working well.

  Q115 Mr Thomas: When you say it is working well, are the numbers increasing? Are people using it?

  Dr Skinner: The numbers are increasing significantly. I am afraid I do not have the numbers available but we could give them to you.

  Q116 Mr Thomas: It would be interesting to see that. Your memorandum to the Committee has said that where there are simple reporting mechanisms and publicity you get more action by local communities.

  Dr Skinner: That is right.

  Q117 Mr Thomas: So it would be interesting to see how that number relates to that.

  Dr Skinner: We will get that information for you. It will show an increase over the time that the system has been working.

  Q118 Mr Thomas: Can I go back to what you were saying earlier when you referred to the need for the individual to know where that skip was going, for example. That is a hag's dream, as we say in Wales. It is a little bit too idealistic, is it not, to think that if I have got my hedge cut and somebody is taking away the rubbish, I might ask them "Where are you going to dump it" and they may say "I am taking it to the civic amenity site", and that is it. Where should we be concentrating our resources? Is it in making the members of the public police the regulations in that way or is it more trying to get people to change their attitudes from square one about waste minimisation in the first place, recycling, composting in their homes, and this sort of thing? Are we not setting the bar a little too specialised when you make those remarks? Perhaps we should be looking at a much wider broad and shallow approach to get people's awareness up.

  Dr Skinner: Obviously I misled you if I was suggesting that was the way we dealt with the waste problem. Waste is a lifestyle problem, it is about the whole way in which we think about the products we use, the products we buy. You start when you buy things, you carry on when you use them and how you might reuse them. All we are saying is that in that spectrum of awareness about the environmental cost of the use of natural resources, one of the issues is that is hopefully decreasing by a proportion and you do take an interest in where the waste is going. I do not mean you have to know which incinerator or which landfill site it is going to but you give it to somebody who has an obligation legally, which is the chain of registration, so you have the confidence that that will be dealt with properly and you will pay the fair price because you know that a responsible person is registered and is paying appropriate charges to manage those registrations. Waste is too cheap, waste disposal is too cheap, and it is because the full costs are not being paid through the system. It is only part of the attack on lifestyle understanding of waste.

  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. On that note we will end this session. We are very grateful to you, you have been helpful. Thank you very much.





 
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