Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-272)
15 DECEMBER 2004
CLLR PAULA
BAKER, MR
DEREK GOODENOUGH
AND MS
ALICE ROBERTS
Q260 David Taylor: I think I did! Where
your members have used the PFI route, how difficult have they
found accessing the funding because the Minister suggested that
there is funding just waiting there to be rolled out into appropriate
schemes. He gave the figure of £400 million.
Ms Roberts: I think there are
a couple of issues. One is that we do welcome funding for PFI.
It is very expensive. I could give evidence from one council where
I think they spent £3 million putting together their PFI.
I would need to get them to give you the details on paper. We
know there are concerns on both sides, both for industry and local
government, about the costs. We have worked and we have worked
hard together to try to tackle those issues. We are also looking
towards promoting prudential borrowing and things like joint ventures
and, frankly, any other way of perhaps trying to attract funding
to this area. We are focused on it. We know there are issues with
PFI. We are working with our sister organisations, the 4ps, and
others to try to improve the issues which are very often around
contracting documents, legal fees and consultants' fees that we
believe are duplicated a lot around the country. We have been
lobbying hard to have a centre of procurement excellence set up
for waste. We hope very much the Government will provide funding
for that. We believe that will enable councils dramatically to
reduce the costs they pay as they go through procurement, but
also beyond procurement as they manage their contracts and in
fact deliver efficiencies as per this Government's Gershon agenda,
which has been our own agenda for a very long time.
David Taylor: There is precious little
sign of that at the moment in the early output from these schemes.
They are extraordinarily expensive to set up and inflexible in
operation, but I welcome the point that you have made.
Q261 Chairman: Perhaps you might be able
to answer this. We have been through PFI. What proportion of the
cost of the project has been represented by the fee structure
you have just described? That would be interesting. Is there in
your area any standard form or template contract which might help
in the future to relieve the concerns which you put forward? Let
us move on to the question of landfill trading schemes. There
seems to be a difference of opinion about whether these things
are going to work. The Minister told us last week that efficient
local authorities that have done well in their waste management
are likely to have credit with this scheme; in other words, there
are supporters. Equally, there are some who disagree with that.
Give us a flavour of how the world of local authorities sees this
scheme. Are there more supporters than antagonists?
Councillor Baker: I think flavour
can be had from a recent workshop that the Local Government Association
held where councillors and officers from a wide range of authorities
were dealing with specific problems that we saw upcoming in the
future. Half of the room was entirely devoted to dealing with
the issue of LATS and the other half was actually looking at the
practicalities of how we deal with the materials we are all collecting
for disposal.
Q262 Chairman: Whose responsibility is
it to sort out the practicalities? The Government has given you
all your targets under this scheme, but whose job is it to make
it work?
Ms Roberts: There are certain
aspects of the trading scheme on which we would have hoped Government
would have taken more of a lead, and in particular have helped
us with setting up some kind of system whereby buyers could buy
and sellers could sell. There is no system out there. Hopefully,
we will be launching a bulletin board for trades next week at
the LGA, which is perhaps an extraordinary thing for the LGA to
do, but somebody had to do it.
Q263 Chairman: That is a sort of waste
eBay, is it? Is that not a jolly good idea because eBay works
without anybody interfering? People just get on and buy and sell
things. Is it not right you should set up something like that?
Ms Roberts: The Government is
committed to setting up a bulletin board, but it has not committed
to doing anything more than that. We believe councils want to
trade now, and that is why we want to set up this bulletin board
now.
Q264 Chairman: Why do you not put your
credits on eBay? They seem to sell everything else like London
Underground parts and old furniture. Your credits would do rather
well on there, would they not?
Ms Roberts: That is a very interesting
idea and one that I had, in fact, thought about. What that would
not tell you, I guess, would be the price. The critical issue
for local authorities is a lack of knowledge about the price.
Local authorities do not work like the private sector or other
sectors. We need to have a certain amount of understanding of
what things will cost in order to be able to budget. This scheme
is going to create particular problems with budgeting because
we do not know the price.
Q265 Chairman: One of the points you
make in your evidence is that this seems to be a potentially difficult
issues, that those authorities that are struggling to meet their
targets may well end up not getting credits but end up being in
deficit. In paragraph 7 you conjecture, and I quote, "One
partnership of authorities, which has put in place plans to meet
the targets, has calculated it could face unavoidable additional
costs of £13 million over a two year period alone if implementation
is delayed by 18 months for example because of challenge in the
planning process". I find that a nightmare scenario. The
first question I put in the margin when I read that is: if the
authority has not got the £13 million, what happens if it
does not pay up?
Councillor Baker: That is our
worry as well. We think there should be at least some kind of
protocol established so that we have some idea.
Q266 Chairman: Are you really saying
as far as the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme that it sounds
like an interesting idea but it has not been properly thought
out and worked through, and that there are some serious practical
pitfalls or elephant traps waiting out there if somebody does
not get hold of it?
Councillor Baker: Our view is
that it could be a useful tool for some authorities to use but
not all.
Q267 Chairman: How is it that the Government
has put one of their principal shirts on this particular rider?
The Minister speaks in glowing terms, and you are looking at me
as a hard-bitten, experienced local government operator and saying,
"This thing is not really going to suit everybody. It looks
as though it is going to fall at the first fence". Is that
your view?
Councillor Baker: It is certainly
our view that it is not going to suit everybody and that it diverts
resource in terms of sheer funding—and really a very important
resource, which is our officer time—from the prime objective
of dealing with waste.
Chairman: In your subsequent note, perhaps
you would like to append your observations as to what needs to
be done to fix this particular nag before it goes into catastrophic
failure at the first fence.
Alan Simpson: In relation to that note,
it would be helpful to the Committee if you were a little less
polite with us. It is almost like Defra officials saying to us,
"This helps a little here and we think it might help there,
and people are doing their best here". By and large, the
Committee is fairly single-minded about the bottom line of our
inquiry and that is: is this going to meet the targets? If it
is not going to meet the targets, you need to tell us. More than
that, if you are, as it were, the front-line delivery vehicles
for this programme and know it is not going to meet the targets,
it would be helpful if you would say, "And if you want to
meet the targets, you are going to have to do A, B and C".
Whether it suits some or others is immaterial to us. I do not
give a toss about that. I want to know the bottom line and whether
the targets are going to be met and, if they are not, what we
have to do. In a sense, that is my plea for a fairly forthright
set of inputs in your note.
David Taylor: If there is not going to
be a hope in hell, do not say, "It will be something of a
challenge" because that is not good.
Q268 Chairman: The word "challenge"
is often use by the Permanent Secretary in Defra and it means
we have not got a cat in hell's chance, but he calls it challenging.
Councillor Baker: I would say
that it is extremely unlikely that we would meet our targets for
2010. Our projections suggest that over the following years it
gets significantly worse than that.
Alan Simpson: That is more like it.
Chairman: Mr Simpson is quite right to
go for bluntness.
Q269 Alan Simpson: In that context, where
the household incentive schemes fit in and we are told that there
is a degree of interest and enthusiasm in this, do you see that
enthusiasm being manifested within the LGA? Are you clear about
the other options that you might have for incentive schemes? How
do you see this so far and what other choices might we have?
Councillor Baker: We definitely
believe household incentives have a role to play but it will not
be one size fits all. They will be appropriate for some local
authorities; they will not be in others. Other forms of incentive
may work in some areas but not in others because this is very
much an area where the local authority needs to go with the full
co-operation of residents and what will work in some areas will
not work in others. What we are seeking is that we should have
the power to introduce such schemes, granted to local authorities,
but local authorities then have the discretion to choose what
kind of scheme, if any, is appropriate in their area. Some authorities
are very keen and believe it would work and would give an incentive
that would encourage their local people on the amount of waste
and to recycle more and will also help by increasing the funding
available to them for their recycling.
Q270 Chairman: I know there is an interest
in trialling direct or variable charges. Do you have any current
examples of other incentive schemes that have worked well in particular
areas?
Councillor Baker: Yes, I believe
there is one authority which puts households that are participating
in their recycling scheme in for a prize draw for a gift voucher,
or something like that, on a regular basis and they found that
increased participation. There is an authority that has given
us a case study on how they have worked with their local community
to ban the collection of side waste and to limit the size of wheelie
bins for residual waste. They have been getting good results,
but in each case these are authorities that have done it after
considerable engagement with their local community and then ongoing
continued engagement because they need to reinforce the feedback
and of course deal with any difficulties that people are experiencing.
Q271 Alan Simpson: Does that then follow
in the opposite direction to what we are being told about planning
approvals, that the pressure to improve the planning system seems
to be time driven? I am not sure how well that sits with what
you have just described as local authorities working closely with
local communities. You do not do that overnight, but it seems
to me that what we are talking about in planning gain is something
really that translates into speeding up the process or the period
within which planning applications are processed. I was following
the Chairman's earlier point: how does that square with something
like an application for an incinerator?
Councillor Baker: The waste strategy
and the development of a waste strategy for an area will take
time to develop. My own authority is within Project Integra in
Hampshire. We had a long community consultation drawing up our
waste strategy, but that still meant that the planning process
was difficult. We have a small incinerator in my own authority.
You are still vulnerable to a very mobile population, in many
of our urban areas particularly. However hard you strive to engage
with your community in developing a strategy, that is only a proportion
of the community and not all of it, and so you are still vulnerable
within the planning system.
Q272 Alan Simpson: Do you see the provision
of the planning guidelines as helping you or hindering you in
the process?
Ms Roberts: The consultation on
PPS10 was published last week, or perhaps even this week. We have
tried to take a look at it in advance of this inquiry. Perhaps
I could make a couple of comments, although without prejudice
to what we might say in our final submission. We welcome the provision
for the idea that plans would be site-specific because we believe
that would give the industry the confidence they need to put in
applications. In terms of the extent to which this would stop
the "challengeability", let us be clear that the processing
of planning applications is not what is slowing this; it is the
"challengeability" and the number of challenges that
are made for waste facilities as they go through the process and
that is a matter of local democracy and needs to be dealt with.
We welcome moves to try to deal with the structural issues in
the process, which are complex, and perhaps we should not necessarily
go into now, but we believe that they will deal with this problem
to an extent. So we broadly welcome what is in the consultation.
We believe that it does raise quite serious capacity issues for
local government because it introduces a role for local authorities
in particular in doing environmental impact assessment, and that
will create a capacity issue. Something that the Committee may
find interesting is that there is a severe shortage nationally
of planning officers in the waste planning area. That is something
we are focused on in the medium term.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for your practical observations. We have found this most helpful.
I am sorry we have left you with a rather long list of further
questions but we are anxious to concentrate on the practicalities.
When you write, I would be most grateful if you would reflect
on what Mr Simpson says and be candid with us; otherwise, we will
not be able to produce a report which will challenge the Government
in those areas where you continue to have reservations. Thank
you very much indeed for coming to give evidence and for your
written contribution so far and in anticipation of that which
is to come. I do hope you have a very happy Christmas but I suspect
that your own activities may, in their own way, generate even
more waste in the New Year.
The Committee was suspended from 3.47
pm to 3.55 pm
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