Examination of Witnesses (Questions 102-107)
14 OCTOBER 2004
MR RIC
NAVARRO, MR
JIM GRAY
AND MR
DAVID STOTT
Q102 Chairman: I am extremely grateful
to you. It just seemed to be sensible since you were still here.
Two immediate issues arose out of that session: one was to do
with construction waste, where clearly what one might call the
reputable parts of the industry do not seem to be interested in
dealing with it and it would be very helpful to have your views
as to who is dealing with that. The other is the question of hazardous
waste which appears to be disappearing. If we could have your
thoughts on that, it would be helpful as well. We do appreciate
that this is not something you were expecting to be asked about.
We shall nonetheless listen with great care.
Mr Navarro: That is certainly
true. We do not have our waste experts with us and I am sure they
would be able to give a much better picture. We were very interested
to hear the evidence from ESA and it does raise worrying concerns
which we were grateful to hear.
Mr Stott: May I pick up on construction
waste first, because that is the issue I mentioned earlier in
terms of proceeds of crime? Three of the cases are concerned with
that and around the Thames region. They are inter-regional—I
do not want to give too much detail—and we are very conscious
and aware of the scale of this. There are many operators who change
identities, who change vehicle registrations, so they are very
difficult to track down, but we are close and hope to bring the
cases to court next year.
Q103 Chairman: They have overseas registration
as well, do they not?
Mr Stott: They do.
Q104 Chairman: I think I know one of
them.
Mr Stott: In terms of the hazardous
waste, we are conscious of what has been said and we have started
an operation to look at a certain aspect in the chain of the disposal
of hazardous waste where we are going to run quite a sophisticated
exercise to see just what is happening and how they are dealing
with it. I would not like to say too much, but we are aware and
we are trying to take steps to combat that.
Q105 Sue Doughty: You talked about one
or two of those cases but what we know as a Committee is that
in fact the disposal sites for hazardous waste and various types
of hazardous waste, particularly in Wales and the South East,
are practically non-existent. That is why I am surprised that
although you have referred to some events, and we are all beginning,
as constituency MPs, to have farmers and councils coming to us
saying that this is getting to be a real problem, yet it sounds
a little bit quiet from your end. It is corporate waste; it is
companies dumping this stuff by and large. In particular, since
17 July, when the end of co-disposal came in, it would be very
interesting to know whether you have seen many more incidences,
or whether you have any metrics on this, or whether you think
it is still working through, in respect of this question of where
the missing hazardous waste is.
Mr Stott: We are taking an active
exercise. I am trying to choose my words carefully, because we
are running quite a sophisticated operation to discover what advice
those people involved in the chain are giving and where it is
going to.
Mr Navarro: Generally we are looking
at the question. We are, of course, interested in this and we
have been looking at this on a weekly, fortnightly, basis.
Q106 Sue Doughty: Have you seen more
incidences? I do not want you to explain what you are doing as
part of the investigation, as I quite appreciate the delicacy.
Mr Gray: There are incidences
of fly-tipping, particularly in the North East and North West,
the examples which David gave before. We are monitoring and keeping
an eye on the number of incidences. We are not seeing huge rises.
The incidences we are seeing tend to be quite minor ones. In terms
of where it is going, since July—just some off-the-cuff
figures—we were getting 500 phone calls a week in June and
July to our call centre but we are now getting 10 or 20 a week.
So the number of enquiries has dropped very markedly. During June
and July, we did about 500 audits out there on the ground of the
major streams. We have been concentrating on three streams: contaminated
soils, asbestos and the tarry, oily waste. Those are the ones
where we predicted there would be big capacity shortfalls. Between
July and now, more landfill capacity has come on stream. A number
of non-hazardous cells, the stable non-reactive cells, are now
in place, so there is capacity for about 0.3 million tonnes—if
I have the figures right—of asbestos which was not there
back in July. I know there are geographic issues, but if you just
look across England and Wales, the landfill capacity situation
does seem better now than it did three or four months ago. That
is one factor. In terms of capacity for asbestos, it is better
now than it was in July. The real problem is just the volumes
of contaminated soil and where that has gone. What I am hearing
is that gate prices are going up, so was the consigning ahead
of time. I am also hearing that a lot of soils was consigned before
as hazardous waste, contaminated remediation stuff which was consigned
as hazardous waste, which now would not be because more segregation
is taking place; soils are still being consigned, but they are
being consigned as non-hazardous waste, because more segregation
is taking place. There is a developing picture and we are doing
a lot more work here. We have regions reporting weekly at the
moment, so we are monitoring this and we are looking to do a number
of operations in the coming months. We have also run a number
of campaigns on vehicles stop and searches. We have been doing
a lot on the ground and there is more coming. In terms of answering
the absolute question precisely as to where it is, we do not have
real-time, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month data. It is
all in arrears, apart from the fly-tipping, which is fairly real
time. The stats from that show very modest, slight increases;
there have been about 30 or so events which stick in my mind,
asbestos-type things, but not big scale, not the scale you were
talking about before, that would explain the missing million tonnes
a year or whatever the gap is that you were referring to before.
I hope that helps. It is not a definitive answer.
Q107 Chairman: No, but it is helpful.
Thank you very much and I am sorry to have sprung that on you
at the end. These are issues we may well want to take up with
the Minister, whom we are seeing next week.
Mr Navarro: Perhaps we could write
to you to give you more information on this aspect.
Chairman: That would be extremely helpful
and any indication you could give of the size and scale of the
so-called missing millions would be particularly helpful, although
we accept, from what we have just heard, that it may not be as
simple as a whole volume of stuff which has just gone somewhere
else; it may be more complicated than that. Thank you.
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