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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