Appendix 4: explanatory information (SI
2008/314)
Site Waste Management Plans Regulations 2008 (SI
2008/314)
Q1: What will be the
practical impact of the Regulations on actual waste disposal and
how will they be enforced in practice?
A1: The Regulations will
help to reduce the overall level of construction waste produced
in England. Site Waste Management Plans (SWMPs) will be one of
the tools used by the construction industry to help them meet
the target - proposed in the England Waste Strategy and to be
confirmed in the forthcoming BERR Sustainable Construction Strategy
- of halving construction and demolition waste sent to landfill
by 2012 (about 20 million tonnes of such waste is currently landfilled
annually in England). As detailed in the Impact Assessment, the
Building Research Establishment (BRE) carried out a survey in
2006 of construction projects that had voluntarily implemented
SWMPs. This demonstrated that SWMPs were helping companies achieve
a reduction in waste of between 10 and 60% per site, while waste
costs were reduced on some projects from 5% down to 2% of total
project value.
The Regulations will also contribute to a reduction
in fly-tipping both by reducing the volume of waste produced and
strengthening the duty of care requirements. Research from the
Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London
suggests that a considerable proportion of fly-tipping is largely
unpremeditated and opportunistic. SWMPs demand the record of a
project's waste movements, checks of which should act as an additional
disincentive to opportunistic fly-tippers. It is difficult to
quantify the precise effect of SWMPs, but the reduction in fly-tipping
required in order to offset any additional costs to the enforcement
authorities amounts to just 0.4% of the total number of incidents
involving construction waste in year 2 and 1.1% of incidents in
years 3-5.
Local authorities and the Environment Agency will
have the power to enforce the regulations, although this will
be just that, a power not a duty. Not all local authorities will
consider the enforcement of SWMPs to be a priority. Indeed it
is possible that only 70% of such authorities will make use of
this power, others relying instead on the Duty of Care and other
fly-tipping prevention measures. We expect the majority of local
authorities to combine SWMP enforcement with other, existing,
enforcement checks they already undertake, ensuring that the extra
burden on either business or the enforcement authorities should
be minimal.
Q2: Is there sufficient
provision of disposal sites close enough to construction sites,
to make the system practicable/cost effective?
A2: As we expect the Regulations
to lead to a fall in the volume of construction waste produced,
no additional disposal site capacity should be required and existing
capacity should not be a barrier to successful operation of the
system. Some companies have suggested to us that not all waste
management companies are yet able to consistently provide the
different waste disposal systems required for successful implementation
of a SWMP - e.g. sufficient skips for segregation, or alternative
disposal routes where the construction site is not large enough
to accommodate sufficient skips. We expect increased demand to
draw out additional supply, but we have also been working with
the Environmental Services Association and Chartered Institute
of Waste Management on design of the SWMP system.
Q3: How will you
measure the success of the Regulations? Are there already quantified
measures which you or others will keep under review?
A3: We will assess how
well SWMPs are achieving their objectives by issuing a questionnaire
within 3 years of the Regulations coming into force. This will
measure the level of compliance, the extent of checks and enforcement
being undertaken, the cost savings from improved materials resource
efficiency and any reduction in fly-tipped construction and demolition
waste.
While there is no legal requirement to submit a Site
Waste Management Plan to the authorities and, therefore, no mechanism
for collating the data contained in them, a number of organisations
who are providing companies with SWMP templates (e.g. the Building
Research Establishment) intend to collate the data collected through
their own templates and use it to develop Key Performance Indicators
and benchmark targets. This will allow us to assess whether SWMPs
are having a direct effect on the reduction of construction waste
at a site level.
We will also be able to use the Flycapture national
fly-tipping database to track the number of fly-tipping incidents
dealt with by authorities which involve construction waste, although
as SWMPs are one of various measures in our fly-tipping prevention
strategy it will be difficult to identify the exact impact of
this measure alone.
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
March 2008
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