Examination of Witnesses ( Question Numbers
420-425)
RT HON
JANE KENNEDY
MP, MR DANIEL
INSTONE AND
MR ROY
HATHAWAY
24 NOVEMBER 2008
Q420 Chairman: When is that target
deficit going to be remedied?
Mr Hathaway: First, Chairman,
we need to remedy the data deficit, then we can remedy the target
deficit.
Q421 Chairman: When is all that going
to be done? Give us a timetable.
Mr Hathaway: There is a pilot
data project which WRAP is helping us with which will be going
on in the early part of 2009, and if we think that that methodology
of capturing the data looks promising on a wider scale, then we
will need to see if we can get together the resources to carry
out another full survey.
Q422 Chairman: So it looks like a
decade on from the last time you looked at it you might actually
be up-to-date?
Mr Hathaway: I am not saying that.
Q423 Chairman: No, I am saying that.
I would not expect you to commit yourself to such a dastardly
point of criticism but that is the way it is looking from here.
Time is bearing down on us and there is going to be a vote in
a minute and this might be the last we see of the Minister, so
I would be grateful if we could have a comment from you, Minister,
about one problem: there has been a lot of suggestion that there
should be a better marriage between local authorities as the collection
agents and the job that they do with household waste to put it
also with commercial waste. For a fee they are able to collect
commercial waste but they seem to interact with difficulty with
the system of landfill allowance trading and their allowances.
Thus where you might want an integrated service you may not be
able to have it because of the problems in terms of the landfill
allowances that individual authorities have. Just take me through
how your Department sees the role of local authorities in dealing
with business and commercial waste and whether there is effort
going to be made to try and rationalise and improve those collections
without the local authorities bearing a penalty?
Jane Kennedy: The former Mayor
of London said that he believed that some of the London boroughs
were stopping collecting commercial waste and simply saying to
the producers of the waste, "Go and find a private company
that will do it for you," and thereby getting out of that
as it no longer formed part of their overall weight in terms of
waste, and they were achieving their targets simply by doing that.
I do not believe that any hard evidence was ever provided to Defra
that that was the case, but I have heard this criticism from other
sources and I want to spend some time looking at and listening
to particularly those in the recycling industries to see where
the rubbing points are from their point of view. I think that
the LATS allowance trading scheme is a very good scheme and it
appears to work very well and there is no evidence that local
authorities are failing dramatically and therefore having to rely
on others to perform extremely well in order to keep the overall
balance. There is also no overall evidence of a dramatic increase
in the amount of waste going through local authorities to landfill.
In fact, the contrary is the case but, nonetheless, I have heard
the criticism and therefore I want to take time to talk to those
who are involved in this, those who operate the big waste recycling
centres, those who are doing it as a business, as a trade. I know
that they make representations to the Department but sometimes
it helps to have the Minister exposed to these arguments too,
and that is what I intend to do in the next few weeks to hear
what the case is against to the current system to see where we
could perhaps take steps to make it work more effectively.
Chairman: You mention provision of facilities
and I am going to move on to David Drew who wants to talk about
infrastructure in the last remaining moments.
Q424 Mr Drew: We had a very interesting
informal session last week with the Audit Commission where basically
they were saying short term the Government can meet its targets,
certainly the 2010 target, but that the 2013 target was questionable.
The interesting thing is—and obviously we are going on to
talk about this and you know that incineration is my obsession—the
vast majority of the evidence that we have had has actually tended
to suggest that we need to be more varied in our approaches to
the waste stream, looking for smaller solutions. That was borne
out by the various representatives of the industry that we have
seen. However, sticking with the 2013 target to begin with, what
difference can you make to ensure that the 2013 target is met?
Jane Kennedy: I do accept that
it will be challenging to meet the targets if the infrastructure
that we need is not in place, and that is why the Department has
been working very hard to enable the development of the landscape.
There is a whole number of projects which I have in the brief
here which will provide that landscape going forward. I know that
there are concerns run around the use of BFI—
Q425 Chairman: We are going to have
to either stop or adjourn because there is now a division in the
Commons. Minister, you have to go at seven?
Jane Kennedy: I am afraid I do,
yes.
Chairman: We do have a number of other
questions that we will write to you about. Thank you for your
oral evidence. This session stands adjourned, or even ended.
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