Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-65)
14 OCTOBER 2004
MR RIC
NAVARRO, MR
JIM GRAY
AND MR
DAVID STOTT
Q60 Sue Doughty: First of all, may I
quickly refer back the point you were making at the beginning
about enforcement? You referred to existing environment officers
and to new special enforcement teams. How many enforcements officers
have you and what is their remit?
Mr Stott: Overall, we have approximately
3,000, but we have started to group them into small specific dedicated
units, special enforcement teams and we have 12 of those across
eight regions. We have just completed a review of their performance
and an average size of them would be around 8 or 10 or so, but
they are individuals who will provide help to the rest of the
enforcement officers; equally, they will pick up the major enquiries
in a particular region and more particularly and more importantly
across regions. We have to deal with crime that spreads across
boundaries; of course it does not stay neatly in a particular
region. With the establishment of those units, we automatically
have a network of individuals who can help each other and pass
information and intelligence between each other. We can also keep
them trained; we can keep them up to speed in terms of legal development
and techniques. The effect of those, just taking one in particular:
before we had them in the Thames region one area had taken six
prosecutions in the year. After the creation of a separate special
team within that particular area, it went up fivefold; the fines
imposed went from a total of £20,000 to £100,000 within
a space of two years. That is the sort of development that we
are looking to achieve.
Mr Navarro: Can we just clarify?
We have 3,000 officers on the ground involved in the environment
work, but they are doing a whole range of work; they are not only
devoted to enforcement, the actual numbers who will be wholly
dedicated to enforcement are those small numbers that we have
talked about.
Mr Stott: Beyond them there are
core groups of specialist teams, eight to ten strong.
Q61 Sue Doughty: How many are typically
in a team?
Mr Stott: Eight to ten within
the special teams. Then there will be other officers also doing
enforcement in general terms, but non specialist, with other duties
as well.
Q62 Sue Doughty: You have explained about
more convictions, higher level of fines with the specialist team,
but what is the actual impact on the occurrence of crime, particularly
corporate and business environmental crime? Have you got any information
about that?
Mr Stott: Whether they are related
I cannot say, but the total number of incidents in categories
one and two, which are the major, most significant incidents which
we measure—categories one and two—have fallen over
the past three years from a total of around 2,000 or so down to
about 1,200. Whether or not it is the effect of them—it
is probably an influence of other factors as well—inevitably
they are going to have an effect.
Mr Gray: Is your question: to
what extent is it the corporations, is it corporations that are
causing incidents and committing crimes, as distinct from . .
. ?
Q63 Sue Doughty: Yes.
Mr Gray: I just wonder whether
we should give you some figures; perhaps we could try.
Mr Stott: About 38 to 40% of the
totality of our case work is registered companies, the rest is
individuals.
Q64 Sue Doughty: Prosecutions?
Mr Stott: Yes; prosecutions. Out
of a total of approximately 700 per annum about 38 to 40% are
against registered companies, the remainder against individuals.
Q65 Sue Doughty: You also said, and you
said this also in the evidence, that you do not have sufficient
resources for tackling those environmental criminals who pose
the greatest risk to the environment. You have told us that the
resources are finite; you have looked at the reinforcement strategy
in order to focus activity where risk is identified as being greatest
and you use the OPRA (Operator Performance Risk Appraisal) tool
to facilitate risk analysis. Could you tell us briefly how that
works and whether you feel it is working?
Mr Gray: I think a good illustration
of how we use OPRA is in Spotlight where you can see we
have used the OPRA data in two ways. I do not know whether you
have the report but you can see the diagrams. We can use OPRA
scores; we band them A to E, where A is a well-managed company
or site—it is done at site level rather than company level—E
is poorly managed. Over time we can track what the sector is doing,
whether things are improving and we can track individual sites.
A well-managed site would need less regulatory effort, less enforcement,
less compliance effort than a poorly-managed site. If a site was
coming out as a D or an E then they would be seeing a lot more
of us, than, say, a site that was an A or a B.
Mr Navarro: We are seeing success
in that direction, because we are seeing the bands gradually going
up and we do not have any category Es this year.
Mr Gray: There are very few. For
a category E we would be there right now trying to do something
about it. We are trying to extend OPRA. The one we described there
was the OPRA scheme for PPC. There is a different OPRA scheme
for waste that we want to merge with the PPC OPRA and we want
to have discussions with the industry fairly soon about how we
do that. We have the longer-term objectives of trying to bring
water companies etcetera into OPRA but that is a number of years
down the road. Certainly OPRA is a very good tool. You know if
you are an A or if you are an E where you stand; you can track
performance. We have internal targets regarding targeting effort
on Ds and Es. The other thing we use OPRA for, certainly in PPC
and also in waste, is to link the OPRA to the charging: the operator
performance correlates to the charging. So for PPC OPRA, there
are financial factors that we then apply to the scores to get
the charging; there is a risk-based charging which reflects regulatory
efforts as well. When you bring in new things like this, it sometimes
takes a bit to settle down, but these are ground-breaking approaches.
When we talk with regulators across Europe and in the USA, they
really are very taken by this and quite a number of regulators
around Europe are in discussion with us about whether they can
use these approaches as well. It is something which we are developing,
we want more types of regulations to come in and we want a consistent
approach across the different regimes under which we regulate
the industry, so we can get a common OPRA system.
Chairman: Thank you very much, that concludes
our session. I am very grateful to you.
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