Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
DEPARTMENT OF
THE ENVIRONMENT
FOR NORTHERN
IRELAND
30 NOVEMBER 2005
Q1 Chairman: Welcome to the Committee
of Public Accounts. Today, under the arrangements following the
suspension of the Assembly we are taking a Northern Ireland topic.
We are considering the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report
on Northern Ireland's Waste Management Strategy, published
in June of this year. We welcome Mr Stephen Peover, who is Permanent
Secretary for the Department of the Environment for Northern Ireland.
Obviously the responsibilities of Mr Peover are different in Northern
Ireland, would you explain the role of your Department to us,
as we are Great Britain Members and not necessarily familiar with
your responsibilities?
Mr Peover: The Department has
a range of functions: environmental policy; environment protection,
through the Environment and Heritage Service; the planning system;
the Driver and Vehicle Testing Agency; driver and vehicle licensing
in Northern Ireland; and responsibility for local government.
Q2 Chairman: Could you please look
at paragraph 1.3 of the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report?
It says there that your performance in transposing EU environmental
directives into Northern Ireland law has, frankly, been woeful
in the past. I know that at one stage 45 items were outstanding,
that was in March 2002, and this has now been brought up to date,
but perhaps you could explain to us why the backlog was allowed
to develop in the first place.
Mr Peover: May I start by saying
that this was a very poor record of transposition and it became
a serious problem for us? The resources in the unit concerned
were limited. There were slightly over 30 staff. Those resources
have been increased very substantially because we recognised that
the backlog was just unacceptable. We have put a substantial investment
into that unit to ensure the backlog was cleared and, secondly,
to ensure that for the future we keep apace with developments
in the rest of the UK and that is now happening. We keep ourselves
abreast of EU dossiers, we have regular liaison with the
Commission, regular liaison with colleagues in Defra and the other
administrations, but there is no excuse for the past failure to
transpose in a timely fashion.
Q3 Chairman: Could you now look at
paragraph 1.6 which tells us that your enforcement team is understaffed
and you could have raised at least £5.6 million more in landfill
tax by proper enforcement to prevent illegal dumping. Why have
you not given this higher priority?
Mr Peover: We have given it a
degree of priority. We allocated some 24 staff out of a relatively
small part of our unit to this function when it became apparent
that substantial illegal dumping was occurring in Northern Ireland.
We bid for additional resources and, in this current year, we
decided as a department to allocate £600,000 additional money
to this function, which should allow us to recruit between 15
and 20 additional staff to help us meet our responsibilities.
It is a very substantial piece of work. We estimate that we should
need £2.5 million to resource this work adequately. We do
not have that flexibility within our budget, but we have allocated
24 staff to the function and we are allocating additional resources
out of the Department's base line to try to catch up on this responsibility.
Q4 Chairman: Could the fact that
you have not been more vigorous in raising this money be explained
by the fact that this £5.6 million would go to the Treasury
rather than to you?
Mr Peover: No; not at all. There
is a real loss to Northern Ireland in this, because when waste
is illegally dumped in Northern Ireland that means it is not being
dumped on legal sites, it is not generating gate fees, it is not
generating landfill tax revenues and therefore it is a loss, not
only to the public purse, but a loss to Northern Ireland operators
of landfill sites and it is a major problem.
Q5 Chairman: I understand as well
that sometimes there is a problem with cross-border dumping. Is
that right? That might be a problem for you in places like South
Armagh. Is that a problem for you?
Mr Peover: Yes, it is. We have
something like 273 approved authorised crossing points on the
border. We have a border which is 370 kilometres long. We have
10 council areas adjoining the border and there is a differential
in the tax regime in the south from that in the UK which acts
as an incentive for criminals to import waste illegally into Northern
Ireland and to dump it on illegal sites. We are talking about
quite a serious level of criminal activity. We are not talking
about minor fly tipping or smaller-scale operators; we are talking
about organised crime.
Q6 Chairman: Can you now please look
at paragraph 2.30? It is a bit of a technical point, but I need
to ask you it. Obviously you have to rely on local authorities
to do a lot of this work for you, but the councils' delay in finalising
their waste management plans impacted on their funding needs and
in March 2002, the Environment and Heritage Service gave them
£1.3 million in grant aid in advance of need. I am told that
this is a breach of financial control. Why did it happen?
Mr Peover: It happened because
we were anxious to move this process on, partly because of the
delay. It also happened because we had sought and had got from
the councils' chief finance officers, written assurances that
the money would be spent within the year in question. It was not
spent; therefore there is a real issue here. We were acting with
the aim of trying to address this problem, get the whole Waste
Management Strategy under way and we were acting with assurances
from the councils. I should have introduced my two colleagues,
Q7 Chairman: I should have asked
you to do that; I do apologise.
Mr Peover: Mr Richard Rogers,
Chief Executive of the Environment and Heritage Service on my
left and Mr Stephen Aston, Head of Waste Management and Contaminated
Land on my right. May I ask Richard whether he wants to comment
on this point about the accounts?
Q8 Chairman: Your answer is fine;
thank you very much. Could you please look at paragraph 3.6 on
page 26 of the Comptroller's Report? An audit of your Department
showed that your own headquarters building only recycled 15% of
its solid waste. It does not say much for your leadership in this
area, does it?
Mr Peover: Yes, I have to agree
with that. In terms of leadership the reason that solid waste
audit was undertaken was as part of the process of trying to show
leadership. It had not been done before. We needed a baseline
assessment of where we stood. We did an assessment across our
sites and the range was from a relatively low 5% up to really
quite reasonable levels, but the average was low for the Department
as a whole. As a result of that, we developed an action plan which
is being rolled out across the Department and that is aiming to
reduce the level of waste going to landfill and to procure recycling
throughout the department.
Q9 Chairman: On the same subject,
paragraph 3.7 says that although Whitehall departments are committed
to 5% annual increases in the amount of waste they recycle or
send for compost, you do not have equivalent targets for the Northern
Ireland departments. Why is that?
Mr Peover: This will come forward
as part of the process of our Sustainable Development Strategy.
We have now set ourselves targets; we have a target in the
Department of reducing our paper consumption by 50% over a five-year
period, so 10% a year. We have a green housekeeping guide which
we have circulated to our staff. We have campaigns of "Think
before you print", paper reduction, we have a programme of
replacing our existing printers or changing our printers to print
double sided rather than single sided, we publish documents in
electronic form rather than paper form. A process is being developed
here which is aimed to feed in, in due course, to our Sustainable
Development Strategy and show that we are actually engaged in
some leadership. We have rolled out the results of our solid waste
audit to all the Northern Ireland departments and all of them
have committed themselves to produce waste management action plans
by the end of the current financial year.
Q10 Chairman: Lastly, paragraph 4.9,
page 36. It says there "In 2001, the NI Public Accounts Committee's
Report on river pollution referred to what it described as the
`wholly unsatisfactory nature of the watchdog role within government'
and expressed concern that Northern Ireland is the only part of
the British Isles without an independent environmental protection
body . . . More recently, the Westminster Northern Ireland Affairs
Committee's Report on the NI Waste Strategy also supported the
establishment of an Environmental Protection Agency". As
clearly the present arrangements have not worked very well, are
you now supporting the setting up of this independent body?
Mr Peover: What I should say is
that the Minister, Lord Rooker, announced in July of this year
that we will carry out a review of environmental governance. What
happened, if I can sketch the background for you briefly, was
that some time ago a coalition of environmental NGOs commissioned
Professor Richard Macrory to do a Report on environmental governance
in Northern Ireland. That Report came up with a number of options.
We have been in dialogue with the coalition since and we have
worked with them to agree a set of terms of reference for a review,
which is what they wanted, an independent review of environmental
governance. The Minister announced that in July. Indeed, I and
some of my officials were talking this morning to the proposed
chairman of that independent review team and the aim is that that
review, depending on his diary commitments, will begin in the
new year.
Q11 Chairman: It has been reviewed,
but you cannot tell us any more about the possible outcome at
present.
Mr Peover: The Minister made it
quite clear at a conference that he sees a strong case for it.
Chairman: That is fair enough; that is
a steer.
Q12 Greg Clark: May I ask the Permanent
Secretary whether he can assure us that Northern Ireland will
comply with the targets for the diversion of landfill from municipal
waste by 2010?
Mr Peover: Yes, I hope so. Those
are our targets.
Q13 Greg Clark: I know they are your
targets, but are you on track to meet the targets?
Mr Peover: We are on track to
meet some of those targets.
Q14 Greg Clark: What about that particular
one, the 25% reduction?
Mr Peover: Yes, we expect to reach
the figure of 25% by the end of next year.
Q15 Greg Clark: By the end of next
year?
Mr Peover: Yes.
Q16 Greg Clark: And going forwards,
do you expect to keep on track and meet further targets?
Mr Peover: Yes. We have done a
review of our Waste Management Strategy which was published for
consultation in October for close of comments by 20 January next.
The aim will be not only to reflect the existing targets but to
strengthen the target-setting process as part of that review,
and to look forward to the creation of long-term infrastructure
to meet the needs for diversion from landfill.
Q17 Greg Clark: May I just clarify
this point? You just told me that you will achieve a 25% reduction
in landfill from municipal waste, which is the target for 2010,
by the end of next year.
Mr Peover: No; sorry, the 25%
target is for household waste.
Q18 Greg Clark: Municipal waste.
Mr Peover: That is our aim and
we will have to assess that progress towards that target along
the way.
Q19 Greg Clark: I know it is your
aim. I asked you what I thought was a clear question. Are you
on track to achieve that 25% reduction target, which is there
for 2010? Are you on track to meet that?
Mr Peover: I think our figure
is 18.2%.
Mr Aston: We are on track to meet
the recycling and recovery target but you have asked specifically
about the diversion and diversion from landfill of biodegradable
waste. Yes, we are on track to meet that target and have heavy
penalties to make sure we remain on track under the Northern Ireland
Landfill Allowance Scheme.
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