Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
DEPARTMENT OF
THE ENVIRONMENT
FOR NORTHERN
IRELAND
30 NOVEMBER 2005
Q60 Mr Williams: For a considerable
time we assume.
Mr Aston: Yes.
The Committee suspended from 4.02 pm to
4.06 pm for a division in the House
Q61 Mr Williams: We are discussing one
of your colleagues in Northern Ireland who made a nice little
home job for himself. That was £3 million and we are told
there about 200 illegal landfill sites. What would an average
illegal landfill site be worth, do you think? Have you put any
sort of value on it?
Mr Peover: It would be very difficult.
They vary in range from quite large settings to a farmer who has
a hole in the ground in a field in his farm who takes a few container
loads of waste. We do have the full range of illegal activity
here from small-scale dumping through to large-scale organised
crime. When my staff go out into some areas along the border they
are accompanied by armed PSNI officers, by soldiers, to protect
them. It is really quite a serious problem. In overall terms,
I am not sure we have a reliable estimate; because this is clandestine
activity, we do not know what the extent of it is. We are uncovering
illegal landfill sites on a regular basis.
Q62 Mr Williams: This may be meaningless
and just say so if it is, but could one say they might average
out at £1 million a site? Would that be excessive?
Mr Peover: They might well; I
do not think that is excessive.
Mr Aston: It is difficult to answer,
because we do not know how many there are. We have stopped operations
at 51 sites and, if you look at what might be going into the black
economy, that could be of the order of £24 million.
Q63 Mr Williams: So it is mega money
and in the circumstance, one does not need to ask about the financial
credentials and other credentials of the people who are behind
these operations.
Mr Peover: They are huge.
Mr Rogers: The most uncertain
thing is the environmental clean-up cost of illegal sites which
may be discovered, for the very reason that you imply, that these
are obviously not going to be engineered, not going to be acceptable
in any environmental way. That is the great question mark that
we have about costs in the future.
Q64 Mr Williams: I can understand
that. Enforcement must be a nightmare and perhaps that is one
of the reasons why you have difficulty recruiting people to do
the enforcement.
Mr Peover: Our staff have been
interviewed on television and we have to pixel out their faces,
because we do not want them to be identified. It is a hazardous
operation not only in environmental terms but in terms of their
personal security.
Q65 Mr Williams: One of the problems
for this Committee is that we look forward to the day when we
can hand you back to Stormont, which should take place, but we
have always erred on the side of being gentle in the hearings
because we recognise the abnormality of the circumstances in which
you operate. Do we see any end?
Mr Peover: We are having significant
success in tackling illegal dumping. We have uncovered a large
number of these, we have shut them down and we have stop-and-search
arrangements with the PSNI, stopping lorries, looking for illegal
waste. The message is going out that there is an inspection regime,
which will deter a number of people. We shall not always be able
to deter criminals, because there are huge profits to be made,
but there is a message that enforcement is being pursued.
Q66 Mr Williams: Switch from that
now to the general position, what you can do, which is make decisions
and produce nice little plans and so on. Why is it that, even
on that front, the Northern Ireland Sustainable Development Strategy
is still not available five years after the Northern Ireland Executive
gave a commitment to produce it? That cannot be for the sorts
of reasons we have been looking at. What are the special circumstances
here?
Mr Peover: I am hesitant to say
it, but it is partly due to the same reasons. The issue with the
backlog of transpositions, the 45 pieces of legislation, is that
the unit which deals with that legislation and policy is the same
unit which is trying to take forward the Sustainable Development
Strategy. For those years in particular, the 2003-04 years, they
were fully occupied in trying to make sure that we had our legislative
programme up to date and avoided the infraction fines that we
talked about earlier on.
Q67 Mr Williams: What surprises us
is that you alone have found this abnormally difficulty. Why is
it difficult for Northern Ireland and not for anyone else to produce
a strategy? Your waste is not different from ours.
Mr Peover: No, it is not. The
whole issue of the Sustainable Development Strategy sits on top
of the full range of environmental legislation. We needed to modernise
our environmental statute book to get us to a position where we
could actually have a sustainable development strategy. The staff
who were involved in that modernisation process are some of the
staff we are now allocating to this process of developing the
strategy. We started later than the rest of the UK. We could not
get started until April 2004 after the backlog had been cleared
and the work has been going on since then. We are in the process
of developing the strategy—the UK published a new framework
in March this year—and underpinning that, there are strategies
for Wales, Scotland, England and there will be one for Northern
Ireland. We are working with our stakeholders, the environmental
NGOs, with the district councils, with business, with agriculture,
as part of a process of evolving a Northern Ireland strategy which
is specific to Northern Ireland, which is not just high level
strategy. The view we have received back from those stakeholders
and from the Sustainable Development Commission is that what we
need to produce is not another high flown strategy alone, but
a strategy which has an implementation action plan associated
with it, which we had intended to do by the summer of next year
and that is still our intention. It is now our intention to combine
the strategy with the implementation action plan.
Q68 Mr Williams: I am due to retire
at the end of this parliament. If I ask you to drop me a note
when you have achieved your objective there, is it likely I should
receive it before retirement?
Mr Peover: Very likely; certain.
Q69 Mr Williams: We shall have a
little bet on it and you can send me that note.
Mr Peover: I am determined to
produce that strategy and the implementation action plan.
Q70 Mr Bacon: May I ask you to turn
to page 43? You will see there that it says the Waste Management
Advisory Board review in 2004 made a number of key recommendations.
The first one was: "Establish an independent Environmental
Protection Agency for Northern Ireland". Has that happened?
Mr Peover: The Minister, Lord
Rooker, has announced an independent review of environmental governance
in Northern Ireland. It is focused on this key issue.
Q71 Mr Bacon: This was a recommendation
from the Waste Management Advisory Board. When did the Waste Management
Advisory Board Report? It was June 2004, was it not?
Mr Peover: Yes, it was.
Q72 Mr Bacon: That was a year and
half ago.
Mr Peover: Yes.
Q73 Mr Bacon: It says here, "Establish
an independent Environmental Protection Agency". My question
was: has that been done?
Mr Peover: No.
Q74 Mr Bacon: When was this announcement
by the Minister?
Mr Peover: July.
Q75 Mr Bacon: Of?
Mr Peover: Of this year.
Q76 Mr Bacon: So a year after the
Report came out he made an announcement that there would be a
review.
Mr Peover: What I should say to
you is that the trigger for that review is not the Waste Management
Advisory Board's view, that is certainly a piece of additional
support, but it has been a long-running issue in Northern Ireland
and, in dialogue with a coalition of the environmental NGOs, a
desktop review was done by Professor Richard Macrory which generated
a Report with a number of options.
Q77 Mr Bacon: When you say that "generated
a Report with a number of options", is that this Report that
is referred to here or is it a different Report?
Mr Peover: It is a different Report.
Q78 Mr Bacon: The recommendation
was in 2004 to establish an environmental protection agency, but
it has taken over a year to decide that you need to talk about
it, is that right?
Mr Peover: No. What has happened
is that there are really two parallel strings of activity going
on here. We have been deeply engaged with the environmental non-governmental
organisations in Northern Ireland and with other stakeholders
in looking at environmental governance. We are the only part of
the British Isles without an independent environment agency body.
A very short review was done, commissioned by the NGOs, which
came out with a set of recommendations which basically were the
same as this but the way forward that they wanted was not for
us just to go ahead—
Q79 Mr Bacon: "They" the
NGOs?
Mr Peover: "They" the
NGOs. They did not want us to go ahead and establish an independent
environment agency just like that. They wanted a process of independent
review to which all the stakeholders, not just the environmental
agency—
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