Memorandum submitted by Gill Pawson
CONSULTATION RESPONSE
1. Its success as an enforcer of environmental
regulation: The principle concerns here are:
(a) the difference between different offices/regions
on the approach to enforcement ie no consistent approach which
I assume stems from a lack of guidelines from national level and
possibly a lack of training of individual officers;
(b) the EA appears to have picked on the
easy targets ie those that they know about because they have registered
exemptions or Waste Management Licences and are prepared to try
to work with them, whereas those operators who have prevented
access to sites or tried to intimidate officers have been allowed
to get away with huge operations that are completely deregulated—examples
can be provided to the committee if needed;
(c) with the change in the Waste Management
Licence exemptions in the summer which now means that all exempt
composting sites (plus some licensed sites) need a landspreading
exemption for the use of the compost on land, the Agency is not
pursuing a programme of contacting all registered exempt and licensed
sites and giving them a deadline for submission of the landspreading
exemption (again it is a question that they have picked on the
easy targets rather than devising a proper programme to get all
operations regulated which is making the playing field very uneven).
(d) on the issue of odour from composting,
they are all too ready to close sites without taking expert advice
on whether the complaints received are justified. So, once a local
resident or campaign group finds out that the EA will be much
more receptive to their complaints than the Environmental Health
Officer, they then just bombard the office with a complaint every
time they know that the operator is turning compost—even
if they do not actually experience any nuisance. Ie they are too
ready to take the easy way out of having to deal with complaints—they
need to learn lessons from the EHOs who have had to deal with
this sort of complaint for years and are much more objective.
2. Value for money and efficient operation:
They seem to spend far too much time on a limited number of sites
without looking at getting a consistent approach across the whole
composting industry, therefore not efficient or value for money.
Also, they take far too long on many issues—they should
acknowledge that they do not always have the technical expertise
needed for a project and agree to buy it in from the private sector,
to help to speed jobs up.
3. Accountability: This is a MAJOR issue.
In local government if there is a problem with something, it is
easy to go to talk to the Head of the Department, the Chief Executive,
the local Councillor, the Head of the Council, to seek a resolution.
The EA's complaints procedure is a last resort and even then it
is a bit of a joke. The EA MUST introduce a section in each region
staffed with officers who can act to resolve problems between
applicants or operators and their own internal departments and
who will have the responsibility to make a final decision ie to
override his colleagues in the technical or licensing departments.
These people must be ACCESSIBLE on a day to day basis.
4. Relationship with ODPM on planning: Here
the issue is one of speed of response to planning applications—it
is a bit better than it used to be but still often not within
the 21 days provided for in the Planning and Compensation Act.
Also, the officers responsible for co-ordinating the response
to the planning authorities do not appear to be given any instruction
to talk to the applicant or their agent before issuing their response.
Therefore letters of objection are sent to the planning authority,
which then take ages to resolve and this whole step could often
be avoided if the EA Planning Officer were to talk to the applicant
to see if additional information or changes to the scheme could
resolve the objection—a holding letter could be sent to
the LPA saying that negotiations were underway, so that everyone
knew what was going on.
Gill Pawson
December 2005
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