Waste Strategy for England 2007 - Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers 160-179)

MR DIRK HAZELL, MR RICHARD SKEHENS AND MS GILL WEEKS

12 NOVEMBER 2008

  Q160  Mr Drew: You recycle it!

  Mr Hazell: Indeed, that is probably the best thing to do with it!

  Q161  David Taylor: It is a serious point. Do you have evidence that charging would improve—

  Mr Hazell: It is a very serious point and I will give you a very serious answer. We are in no doubt that the last Secretary of State and the last Minister of State would have gone further. I think they probably thought with the Waste Strategy that they were doing what was politically possible with their quite timid proposal on the "polluter pays" principle. As a general environmental principle, you should support polluter pays. In terms of empowering local authorities to do what the Government is asking of them, it is probably better to give local authorities the power to do it. In terms of whether it works elsewhere, we did in 2002 commission quite a detailed study, a short one but detailed, from Ernst & Young which looked at continental experience and, if you want it, we are more than happy to table that again as supplementary evidence and also the MORI poll we commissioned at that time which shows that the public already think they are paying much more than they in fact are for the household waste services they get.

  Q162  David Taylor: Do you recognise the political difficulties that would be thrown in front of the authorities that might want to move down that line?

  Mr Hazell: Well, there is one political difficulty in one part of one particular political party, but it is not even the whole of that party. There is a certain amount of populism around this agenda, yes.

  Q163  David Taylor: Have you any ideas what level of charge might be necessary to really start to change behaviour in that regard?

  Mr Hazell: Well, we would be very happy to re-table the Ernst & Young report that gave indicative references to other European cities, but the whole point of piloting, and we hope that local authorities will pilot it, is actually to see what works in this country at this time in different types of area.

  Q164  David Taylor: Do you have a structure for the pilots?

  Mr Hazell: Well, I think it should be for the local authorities to decide what they want to do in their area. One of the complications has been that, when we started looking at this, we thought it would be an additional non-tax revenue stream, and what has not actually helped is that this Government was not terribly joined-up, so the proposal that came out of Defra for understandable political reasons turned out to be a tax, and that was not the original intention.

  Q165  David Taylor: And the most well-to-do, middle-class areas, the Lichfields of this world, are able to achieve astonishing recycling rates, and of course inner-cities find that more difficult, do they not?

  Mr Hazell: We have always ourselves emphasised that whatever comes into play must not be regressive. When Ernst & Young did their report, that led them to the conclusion that, to start with, the charge should be a direct, flat-level charge suitable for the local community rather than a variable one because obviously, if you are on income support, even if it is £1 or £2 a week, that is a big percentage of your income.

  Q166  Miss McIntosh: Can I just ask what more we can do to recycle plastics and cardboard?

  Mr Hazell: More is being done in the sense that a bit more infrastructure is being put in place in this country and a lot of it is being exported for recycling. I do not know if either of my colleagues want to add.

  Mr Skehens: I think there is an awful lot of work going on in the background to extend the use of recycled plastics and also to look at the segregation of plastics so that you can get a much better split rather than just PET or HDPE. That is happening, but I do not think it is happening as quickly as everybody would like, but I think that will happen over the next two to three years and there will be advances there, and also in the segregation of the plastics.

  Q167  Miss McIntosh: How could we speed it up?

  Mr Hazell: Clear signals on the landfill tax are always going to be helpful.

  Mr Skehens: That is a really good driver, particularly for businesses.

  Q168  Miss McIntosh: I think Dirk did say that the UK is very short of replacement for landfill, that we are very light on the infrastructure really to replace landfill, so presumably that counts for this as well.

  Mr Hazell: We are going to have difficulty with the 2013 targets, there is no doubt, because there is delay in providing the infrastructure.

  Q169  Miss McIntosh: Is that because of planning?

  Mr Hazell: Your question was not particularly time-specific. If you want to accelerate plastics, as Richard has said, for industrial and hazardous waste, the price signal is going to be very effective very quickly, and you are starting to see that the change in the climate for plastics has been quite rapid.

  Q170  Lynne Jones: You say in your submission that "regulation makes the market" in the waste sector and you have already, I think, given us some examples of where you think more regulation would actually help in this. Would you like to expand on that and let us know whether regulation is doing enough to make the market.

  Mr Hazell: Well, it could always do more, but, in all honesty, if we appeared, as we did, before this Committee five years ago, we would have said that regulation was as much a hindrance as a help. I do not think that is the case any longer. I think that the standard of regulation is better, but this country is still very slow to implement the European producer responsibility laws. On average, they come in about three years after they are supposed to come in in this country, so there is a weakness on the producer responsibility. There is certainly, as we have said a number of times, a need for a strong signal over a sustained period on the landfill tax; that is important. We would not object, as an industry ourselves, to legally binding recycling targets for some components of business waste, as long as they are justified environmentally, and one of the difficulties we have got with that is that the measurements for environmental sustainability are not what they should be. The OECD has been working on this for about 10 years and it has not really had support from all the governments, including our Government, that it might have had and the result is that the private sector is tending to fill the gap, and certainly our sector is among those that is putting its own voluntary sustainability indicators in place. I think what would also be helpful, and it is a sort of regulatory issue, is that local authorities should be doing much more than they are to provide planning consents for new recycling and recovery infrastructure, and that is for business waste, not just their own municipal waste. A really fundamental gap in the regulatory picture at the moment, and Gill is happy to talk about this in much more detail, is the lack of awareness of three-quarters of Britain's SMEs even of the fact that they have a duty of care because, if you have price signals and you have the basic knowledge that there is a legal duty, then actually, as long as it is seen to be enforced, most people are going to follow those signals quite readily.

  Ms Weeks: As Dirk said, it is quite frightening, particularly with the SMEs, that a lot of people do not know what their responsibilities are. I think you took some good evidence from the Environment Agency about how they are trying to deal with environmental crime because that obviously comes in where, as the charges go up for disposal and dealing with their waste, clearly the environmental crime becomes more attractive. ESA helped with getting BREW funding for the Environment Agency to tackle crime, but I still think that we should be able to see some direction of landfill tax being put back into the Environment Agency to help fund environmental crime because I am not convinced that they are resourced enough to be able to deal with that. We need a national media campaign, I think, as well to make the SMEs and the small businesses aware of what they need to do, and again there was a £50,000 budget allocated by Defra for communicating the changes to the duty of care, and that is clearly wholly inadequate: we need a big national campaign. We have started seeing it for the domestic stream and I think we need to get it on to the mainstream media. The other one really is the registration of carriers. It is relatively simple to set up as a waste carrier; you just pay a fee to the Environment Agency. There is no technical competence or anything that you have to go through to get that, so I think that would help as well and it would just drive up standards across the business and hopefully get more waste out to be recycled.

  Q171  Lynne Jones: Some of the money from the landfill tax is going to fund the BREW, the Business Resource Efficiency and Waste Programme, and also I am particularly interested in the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme because the headquarters are in my constituency. Would you care to comment on the effectiveness of those programmes which did actually suffer cuts in the last Defra budget?

  Mr Hazell: I was actually on the BREW steering group and a lot of the recipients were not terribly good at demonstrating their inputs and outputs, and I am not referring to anybody by name. The Environment Agency were actually very good on the money that we helped to secure for their enforcement, they had very good input/outputs. The BREW Programme, as you know, has come to an end and, I gather, another select committee will be looking at that next year. As far as NISP is concerned, we are not really the right stage of the market for them, we are the people that put the materials back in for reprocessing and we hand the materials over to the reprocessors, and the main function of NISP is really to provide outlets for them, for those reprocessors.

  Q172  Lynne Jones: But it is also to put companies in touch with one another, so one example is of stuff from the pottery industry, which used to go to landfill, actually going direct to the roofing industry to be made into roofing materials, so you cut out the middle man, as it were.

  Mr Hazell: Indeed, and you are going to see a lot more of that as the landfill tax rises. Businesses will be doing more and more of that as the landfill tax goes up, it will be a very effective driver, and obviously, if there is some medium for providing information, that can only be helpful.

  Q173  Lynne Jones: Is there anything that you, as an organisation, are doing in terms of sharing best practice?

  Mr Hazell: Well, we do it all the time with our members' customers. Most of the businesses in this country that know they have a legal duty of care know they have it only because of companies like Richard's and Gill's who tell them about the duty of care. It has been the case for many years that our companies work inside factories, for example, advising companies on how to reduce and mitigate their waste streams and how to improve recycling.

  Ms Weeks: We work closely with NISP as well, it is an organisation that we have contact with, and we check fairly regularly what streams they are looking for and whether we, within our controls, have those kinds of streams, so, wherever possible for our big customers, we are looking to source their waste where it can be reused, so the big customers, I think, are covered and it is the SMEs that are more difficult to get to.

  Q174  Lynne Jones: And that is where NISP has actually been more effective in the small businesses, I think.

  Mr Skehens: Once again, as a company, Grundon do actually do a regular newsletter which updates all our customers on new legislation that is either just coming in or is already in there, so there are updates because, without that knowledge, it is very difficult for them to recycle and to treat their waste properly. I think more education of the SMEs would be beneficial and it should not just be down to the waste industry to do that, and I think with a lot more effort from other groups, including the Environment Agency, it would help the situation no end.

  Mr Hazell: We have dropped a very heavy hint on a public information campaign.

  Q175  Lynne Jones: Well, I am sure the Committee will take those points on board. Could I ask you whether responsibilities for municipal waste should be more effectively joined up with those for non-municipal waste?

  Mr Hazell: There are a lot of problems with doing that. We are not sure it is the right thing to do. There are all sorts of competitive issues, for a start. Supposing a company, like Richard's or Gill's, has got some treatment infrastructure in place, it happens to be in a local authority that has got some spare PFI resources and that local authority decides to build something subsidised next to that site, then you have automatically got difficulties with competition. I think the best advice we can give this Committee is that, if the landfill tax goes up and if regulations are enforced, then this country's businesses are going to do pretty much everything they need to do without a great deal of changes in contractual relationships.

  Q176  Lynne Jones: Is the existence of the landfill tax though considered to be a perverse incentive for local authorities actually taking on some of these responsibilities? I know that you do not think it should.

  Mr Hazell: Yes, the LAT Scheme is a perverse incentive for local authorities, and again we have signalled that there is difficulty with the 2013 targets. It would actually be quite perverse for local authorities, when they have got that difficulty with 2013, to add to those difficulties within the LATS framework by taking on responsibility for additional waste streams.

  Q177  Lynne Jones: Well, only if it was a more efficient way of collecting, or dealing with, both streams.

  Mr Hazell: The problem is really the micro businesses. The large businesses, as Gill and Richard have said, are dealing with it themselves and the medium-sized ones. The problem, to the extent that there is one, is really the micro businesses, but we really do think that, once the landfill tax hits £48 per tonne plus, a clear government signal that it is going to stay at that level or higher, and once these businesses know they have a duty of care that will change the dynamics very quickly.

  Mr Drew: Are PFI credits the best way to be dealing with local authorities' waste products?

  Chairman: Can I ask you to respond to that when we come on to Paddy's question because the two are related.

  Q178  Paddy Tipping: You say that the alternative infrastructure to landfill is inadequate? Why is it? Is it so inadequate that we are not going to meet the new targets for recycling diversion?

  Mr Hazell: It looks like the 2010 targets are okay. The recycling progress in recent years has been very good and household recycling in England has more than quadrupled in the last decade, so that is pretty good, but this Committee knows from pained evidence it has taken from us in previous years that it was a very, very slow process to get started. Defra themselves have published a schedule of how long some of this infrastructure is going to take to get on-stream. Richard Skehens is bursting to give you recommendations for, and tales of woe about, the planning system. There are real difficulties in getting the infrastructure on-stream, so 2013 is at risk, yes.

  Paddy Tipping: So, Richard, you had better tell us about that.

  Chairman: It is the "give us the woes" session now.

  Q179  Paddy Tipping: There is a Planning Bill going through Parliament now, as we speak, but it does not do much for you, does it?

  Mr Skehens: No. However, we did have one or two suggestions where we hope things can be speeded up. First, the timing, and inadequate delivery, of the waste development frameworks would be very helpful. I think, so far, only five local authorities have their waste development plans in place. Now, we happen to be in a state of limbo while they are not there and that is very difficult both for the local authorities and also for developers trying to get facilities through, so that is one area where, if there could be a big push there to get the waste developments plans through, at least it would give a bit of steer to where we want to go. At the moment, the industry are a little bit in the dark. The next recommendation is to extend the permitted development rights within our sector. Other utilities have obtained the permitted development rights and, although it might not seem a major issue, when we have to go for planning permission for minor, uncontroversial development within an existing waste site, it does make life more difficult and slows things down, so the reintroduction of PD rights to waste sites would be—



 
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