Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-71)
MR PAUL
GIBBS, MS
JEAN SPENCER
AND MR
MARTIN SILCOCK
31 OCTOBER 2006
Q60 Joan Walley: What about local
area agreements that local authorities have with other partners
to agree set targets in terms of policy areas across the board?
Ms Spencer: The only reason I
am hesitating is that in our region with 60 local authorities,
which in itself makes it quite difficult to actually engage with
all of them, it is how do you get an umbrella organisation to
pull those together in making those decisions, but there are mechanisms.
In our region we have Go East as the Government Office and there
is also the East of England Development Agency which ought to
be capable of having a role in pulling those issues together.
Q61 Joan Walley: Do you find that
they do have that role?
Ms Spencer: It has worked better
with things like the Regional Spatial Strategy and the examination
in public has pulled together the various aspects, but I think
it is difficult actually. There is no easy answer really.
Mr Silcock: One of the things
that it seems to me might be a plausible thing to do would be
to make it more visible to the bodies which are involved in making
implementation decisions in relation to policy, the reasoning
and the costs and benefits that went into the earlier policy decision,
so to make that visible to those bodies and somehow place some
sort of expectation that those costs and benefits are taken into
account within the local context. Coming from the other side,
for those departments perhaps in central government who are coming
up with regulatory impact assessments, there needs to be some
way of looking forward towards the potential implementation options
that might be available to implement those policies, so, if you
like, identify the key groups and stakeholders that might be involved
in implementing policies, take a look at where they are coming
from in terms of the lens through which they will look at the
particular decisions they will have to make and try in some sense
to predict what sort of choices they may need to take and do all
that at the time you are considering the main policy decision
itself. It is sort of connecting the different phases of the policy-making
process together, so to the extent that you might get a gap in
that you come up with a policy and then shove it out somewhere
else to be implemented, it is realising that there are decisions
which are made lower down the tree, if you like, that will impact
the conventional outcomes.
Q62 Joan Walley: The NAO have highlighted
to us that they identified that there were few social or environmental
impacts, that they were not really all covered. How do you think
we can explain this poor consideration of these issues? Do you
think it is restricted scope, lack of awareness or other factors?
Mr Silcock: I think restricted
scope in some instances clearly does seem to take an account,
and I am really only going on what I have read from the NAO as
well, but it is difficult. It would seem to me that the fundamental
reason is that taking account of environmental and social impacts
is inherently much more difficult and uncertain than taking account
of economic impacts because in most cases there is no obvious
value to be ascribed to those impacts and, therefore, it is perfectly
understandable that less account is taken of those. Now, I think
the broad thrust or one key focus of improving this approach should
be a real push perhaps from the centre to try and help policy-makers
value those costs and benefits which are currently very difficult
to value. The idea of a toolkit that the BRE are suggesting, I
think, is a very valuable one, a very good one, and that is where
giving some central government weight behind the sorts of values
that policy-makers might use across both central government and
in government agencies or local government, I think that would
be a very important thing to take forward.
Q63 Joan Walley: I think really you
touched on this earlier on, but do you think it should be a requirement
to address environmental concerns irrespective of the topic under
regulation?
Ms Spencer: Yes, definitely.
Mr Silcock: Yes.
Q64 Joan Walley: Do you think that
it is likely to happen, that it is now on the radar, or do you
think that is a message that needs to go out much more strongly
and clearly?
Ms Spencer: Hopefully with the
Stern Report yesterday and the increasing focus on the impact
of climate change yesterday, I would hope it would be taken into
account and be seen as being essential.
Q65 Joan Walley: I think one of the
issues that we find is with all of this it is the devil that is
in the detail. We had Stern yesterday and there is a huge amount
of work that needs to be done. What kind of corporate responsibility
do you have within the area that you cover and the 60-odd local
authorities that you work with to try and get this message across
or to try and increase public awareness because, otherwise, there
will be no public buy-in to these ideas which are actually very
technical and very complex? What are you doing to engage with
the public on this?
Ms Spencer: I think a number of
things and one of the key things we have done recently is that
we are reinvigorating our education programme, so we are opening
education centres across our region and also we are in the process
of setting up a mobile education unit that we can take out to
schools. A key part of that, as well as looking at the water cycle
and so on, is picking up the impact of climate change, pushing
on water efficiency and so on, so that is one area and that has
been the main focus of the last 12-18 months for us, to get that
up and running. We are also very focused on things like water
efficiency and trying to link that into climate change and so
on, but I think we do have a responsibility. We are also looking
at how we can widen out the climate change impact message more
widely and that is something we are actually actively looking
at at the moment because at the end of the day the impacts come
back to our water sector and to our customers, so we are looking
at that message. The key thing at the moment is picking up on
the education side and how we get that message out to schools.
Q66 Chairman: You have referred to
the difficulty of measuring some environmental impacts in monetary
terms, but what are the other ways in which they can be measured
which might be helpful?
Mr Silcock: Carbon footprinting,
I suppose, is the obvious quantitative measure that springs immediately
to mind, and certainly that has a lot of merit. I think that getting
to a monetised measure is still important notwithstanding that
because it seems to me that that is the only way one can compare
options one with another and make the trade-offs that need to
be made, but I think measures such as carbon footprinting have
a lot of merit in them. If one is unconfident about converting
that measure into money, then that measure may very well be useful
for comparison purposes. Now, there may be other measures, and
I do not know, I am not an expert in this, but if you were looking
at biodiversity, for example, you might have a measure of species
loss or something of that nature which would equally be quite
important. I think one of the tasks is to try and do some work
on what are the measures which would be useful and what are the
measures which are measurable and what is practicable to do. That
is something that we are concerned with ourselves and we are doing
work on to try to understand what we actually can do to measure
this stuff, but certainly a push from government towards that
would be extremely useful.
Q67 Chairman: What about the question
of whether RIAs should be subject to a better review process?
Do you have a feeling about that?
Mr Silcock: I think it is difficult
for us to comment really from the outside. We are not really clear
on what the review process currently is, so it is a difficult
one for us on that.
Ms Spencer: I think it seems sensible
in the Better Regulation Report that it is suggesting sign-off
by ministers and so on, but I think the question is how robust
is the process behind that.
Q68 Mr Hurd: How content are you
with the effectiveness of UK RIAs in relation to the implementation
of EU legislation? Can you give us an example of how your company
has been affected by it?
Ms Spencer: I think our experience
is that once an EU Directive is in place, the assumption is that
we have to implement it irrespective of the impacts of that Directive.
Q69 Mr Hurd: There can be quite a
broad scope in how it is implemented.
Ms Spencer: Yes.
Q70 Mr Hurd: The issue is how robust
we are in reviewing all the options.
Ms Spencer: Yes, I think that
is right and I think Paul gave as an example P removal. There
are other examples as well. There is the Hazardous Substances
Directive and I think what we found there is that, in its original
interpretation, it was being proposed that we would have to register
every one of our premises because they all have hazardous waste
of some kind or another mostly because they have some control
panel where then ultimately we will have to dispose of that electronic
equipment. As it is envisaged, we would have had to register 25,000
premises even though some of them are little huts, cabinets on
the site with a control panel inside. Well, that was clearly gold-plating
and was completely unnecessary, though I did not see the regulatory
impact assessment for that, but I cannot imagine that it was not
required in terms of the original EU Directive, so there needs
to be absolutely robust application of that regulatory impact
assessment when it is translated into UK legislation and is then
implemented. I think it does need to be enhanced.
Q71 Mr Hurd: What is your reaction
to the BRE consultation document?
Ms Spencer: I think our view there
is that there are a lot of good positives in there and particularly
it is very clear that there is a requirement to include the environmental
and social costs and that it has to address sustainable development
principles. It is very positive that it says there has to be a
statement where we are going beyond the EU Directive requirements,
positive in that it is envisaging a toolkit, although I would
question what that would look like. I think our concerns with
it are principally that there should not be a separate environmental
assessment, that that needs to be brought into looking at the
overall impact. I think it is a good thing to change the name
to an `impact assessment' rather than a `regulatory impact assessment'
because then it covers all of those impacts, but not taking a
piecemeal approach. I think where we are concerned is that, if
you look at the pro forma for the summary, sustainable development
is somewhere down lost in the detail with the sort of yes/no,
and I think where we would want to see it much clearer in terms
of looking at the impact is right up-front and more prominent
than that. Do you have any comments to add, Martin?
Mr Silcock: No, I think that is
right. I think we are pleased that it is trying to focus on the
core purpose which is the clarity and rigour of analysing benefits
and costs across the three strands of economic, social and environmental,
and it seems to me that is a very positive thing coming out of
it. The negative thing for us is that talking about decoupling
certain aspects of the assessments seems to be misguided, I think,
and we need to bring those aspects of the assessment into the
holistic perspective.
Ms Spencer: But I think also that
it is good that the regulatory impact assessments state that it
is not thrown away and something else put in its place because
it is recognised as a requirement and it is being complied with,
it is just the quality of that compliance.
Chairman: Well, thank you very much.
That was very helpful and interesting. Thank you for coming in.
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