Examination of Witnesses (Questions 580-599)
Ms Julie Hill, Miss Hannah Hislop, Mr Andrew Lee
and Ms Sue Dibb
11 MARCH 2008
Q580 Baroness Platt of Writtle: We
have an example of cars or washing machines.
Mr Lee: Yes.
Q581 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Surely
one of the problems you would have in the system you are favouring
is this. When I buy my electricity I pay very much more for my
first initial units than I do for my subsequent units. It strikes
me that if you are interested in energy conservation, it would
be much better to invert that so that you get the first lot relatively
low and then as soon as you start using it over and above that,
you start to pay more and more and more and it escalates.
Mr Lee: Yes, block tariff.
Chairman: That is not quite where we need to go,
although it is a fascinating subject.
Lord Howie of Troon: In passing, I quite like
the idea of using glass on road surfaces and also rubber tyres.
I do not regard it as uneconomic.
Lord Crickhowell: It is for glass manufacturers.
Q582 Lord Howie of Troon: We will
not pursue that. I was going to ask you about the Government's
activities in getting the various groups together and so on but
that has been largely answered by earlier questions. What I want
to ask you about really is: to what extent has the Government
been able to get the various Government departments to act together
to work all in the same direction or is it the usual confusion?
Mr Lee: It is tempting to say it is the usual
confusion. It is extremely difficult to make this work. This was
a key finding from our work on supermarkets. What Government was
saying to us is, "Oh, well, we let the market decide. We
do not interfere with Tesco". What actually happens is that
lots of different departments have a foothold in the way supermarkets
operate and have conflicting and overlapping policies: is it Fairtrade
or is it food miles and so on. It is a huge challenge to get those
departments to work effectively together, but there are some examples.
One that we have not mentioned today yet is called Mobility 2020
which was BERR and has the potential to produce this partnership
now which says, "Let us look at cars. Let us look at how
we design them for the future. Let us look at how we optimise
that design to provide the travel service people want and lower
CO2 emissions", so there are some examples. It is like everything
else; getting this cross-sectoral work between departments is
extremely hard. That is why we think products are quite a good
way of doing this; it is so tangible that it sort of forces you
to look at the issue and then you can pick out which parts of
the industry you need to work with and which consumer groups.
You can bring round the table with a very tangible outcome: how
are we going to get this product from where it is now to being
much more sustainable? There are pockets of good practice but
it is very challenging. It is against the culture, as you know,
of Whitehall departments to work in this way.
Q583 Lord Howie of Troon: Much of
what has been said earlier in the morning convinces me of something
of which I have been well aware, namely that Government is extremely
difficult and that the politicians are sometimes unfairly blamed
for what goes wrong. Going on from that, what do you think of
the Government's Waste Strategy, which was produced last year?
Ms Hill: It was better than we expected, to
be honest; a very valuable link between waste and carbon, which
came to the fore really only after David Miliband came into Defra
and started paying attention to where the main contributions to
reducing UK carbon emissions might come from. He realised that
contributions from the waste sector were really very significant,
and therefore the Waste Strategy that was nearing completion should
look hard at the carbon implications of waste handling. That is
when work was done and was quoted showing that in 83 per cent
of the cases looked at, recycling has a carbon advantage over
alternative treatment. Those connections began genuinely to be
made that we are going to be looking at a resource constrained
world where we are worried about carbon emissions and we are also
worried about the waste of resource that is represented by waste.
I think we have started to move politically from a feeling that
waste is an end of pipe problem to be dealt with in the most economically
rational way to thinking about waste as a recoverable resource.
The tone and the spirit of it were very much more positive. Of
course, we then have to have policy instruments, whether fiscal
or regulatory, to put that into practice. We did almost at the
same time have the very welcome, larger than expected rise in
the Landfill Tax, which we have talked about—very positive,
although it may not be doing exactly what was envisaged—but,
frankly, we do not have a lot else. The targets for municipal
waste recycling were not put up hugely. There are no targets bearing
on commercial and industrial waste in the Waste Strategy other
than mentioning possibly working towards a 50 per cent recycling
target for construction and demolition waste when we should be
able to recycle 90 per cent of that stream, to be honest. So it
is very unambitious on the industrial waste side, and a lot of
talk about products and materials and looking at them but no envisaged
policy instruments. There is a new unit within Defra that will
apparently look at products and materials, but there is nothing
on the table in terms of the product standards we have been talking
about or the product levies, or reform of VAT or individual producer
responsibility or any of the things that we can quite clearly
identify as being appropriately biting instruments to get change.
That is what we work on now, advocating that this general positive
tone in the Waste Strategy is followed up by very definite policy
instruments and certainly is not taken in the wrong direction
by diversions into notions about energy from waste solving all
our energy security problems.
Q584 Lord Howie of Troon: Better
than expected is rather encouraging.
Ms Dibb: We have also been looking at where
we think it needs to go next. What we are calling for is a packaging
strategy because we think in relation to packaging it certainly
does not go far enough and is lacking ambition. We are calling
on BERR and other departments and agencies to come together to
develop a strategy particularly on packaging. We felt it was a
lost opportunity in the Waste Strategy to adopt what we said earlier
are rather unambitious targets of the Courtauld Commitment. It
has just adopted them; it has not set any longer term targets
and that is a particular weakness in it. There are other weaknesses
around the current packaging legislation, for example regulation
around excess packaging. In reality it is pretty unenforceable,
partly because the wording around consumer acceptability is often
used as a get-out clause, to say that it is really what consumers
want. That has not been tested in our view. Secondly, the enforcement
agencies are local trading standards departments that are stretched
across so many areas that it really is not a priority for them.
Unless we get that sorted out, for example through bringing all
those parties together in a packaging strategy, we are not really
going to make progress there, we feel.
Q585 Lord Howie of Troon: With funding
you do not get everything, do you?
Ms Dibb: It is always useful to call for it
and to ask what the next step is, where do we go from here. We
should not rest on our laurels.
Q586 Lord Haskel: Under the Climate
Change Bill, each Government department has now appointed a Minister
in charge of adaptation. Do you think that this is where we might
find some co-ordination over waste disposal and some of the things
that you have been talking about?
Mr Lee: Not really. I think what you will see
is that there is much more rigorous accountability placed with
Permanent Secretaries in each department for the operations of
that department. I hope you will be seeing some announcements
on that very shortly. I think that is good because it places the
accountability where it needs to be. It is saying to those Permanent
Secretaries, "You are as responsible for the sustainability
performance of your department, particularly carbon but lots of
other things, as you are for its financial performance. This is
written in to your remit."
Q587 Chairman: Does that keep them
awake at night?
Mr Lee: Put it this way: it did not used to
but I think over the last few weeks—
Chairman: Over the last few years, we find that
Permanent Secretaries have a rather cavalier attitude towards
other people's money.
Q588 Lord Lewis of Newnham: We did
have a Green Minister in each department a number of years ago.
What has happened to those?
Mr Lee: The Green Minister system has slightly
gone by the wayside. It is not effective.
Q589 Lord Crickhowell: We are coming
on now to the Sustainability Development Commission's ideas on
the roadmap approach. I am slightly tempted to inquire whether
if you had a roadmap approach to the giving of evidence to this
Committee you would have produced 144 pages of evidence before
you started talking to us, all of which had to be printed and
would eventually finish in the wastepaper basket. I do think we
need to get the presentation of these cases right. This is quite
an important point which relates to road-mapping. As you say,
the key objective of the roadmap is to build a critical mass of
enthusiasm and commitment for the stakeholders in what is quite
a complex process. If you are going to get that, the whole thing
has to be presented rather clearly and sharply and not be swamped
in a mass of documentation and paper. I make that point. What
are the key products or sectors that most urgently need a long-term
waste strategy and to which this whole technique might be directed?
Ms Dibb: It is a technique that we have been
advocating; it is a technique that we advocated Defra take up
as ten product roadmaps and we are pleased to say that Defra has
initiated ten product roadmaps. We are keen, and are working closely
with Defra and other Government departments now, to learn the
lessons of the road mapping approach, and Defra will be presenting
a report this summer on its products and material strategy that
will be reporting on how road-mapping can be used. One of the
key principles of the roadmap, and you will see in the document
that we sent, six stages of the roadmap is about convening and
about bringing people together. For us I think it is less about
the pieces of paper; it is about bringing people together, giving
space in which they can themselves determine—that is people
from government, business, civil society and other interests—what
possible research they might need, what possible evidence they
might need to help build that roadmap. It very much starts with
bringing people together. We have identified three areas that
we have been working on where we feel this approach can best be
advocated in relation to the subject which we are talking about
today. One relates to packaging, which I have just spoken about.
The second one relates to construction, which Andrew may say a
bit more about. The one I want to say something about now is food
waste. Food waste is a big problem. It is not just a moral issue,
and for many people it is, but it is a really important issue
for carbon emissions. At the moment, something like 6.7 tonnes
of food waste comes from our households.
Q590 Baroness Platt of Writtle: Part
of the trouble there is the sell-by date, is it not?
Ms Dibb: That is one of the issues that needs
to be looked at in this. The second point is that that equates
to something like 15 million tonnes of CO2. It is not a small
problem but a large problem.
Q591 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
It is methane too because if it goes to landfill, it creates methane.
Mr Lee: It is equivalent to, and so a lot of
it is methane, yes.
Ms Dibb: So there is a very big potential there
for addressing food waste and to contribute positively to our
climate change impacts. We do not yet, in our view, have an adequate
strategy to address that. The current WRAP commitments—and
you may have seen some of the advertising around the food waste
campaign—is committed by this month to reduce food waste
by 100,000 tonnes. That sounds a lot but it is only about 1.5
per cent of the actual problem. Our question is: what then? What
are the longer term targets? What can be realistically achieved
around food waste? We are not getting there at the moment and
that is where we feel we need a longer term strategy. There are
all kinds of barriers. You have mentioned the issue about sell-by
dates. I think that is one point that perhaps needs to be looked
at. There are real food safety issues around many foods. The sell-by
and use-by dates were introduced at a time when we had had a lot
of major problems on food poisoning.
Baroness Platt of Writtle: I do not pay much
regard to them. I just go on using them until they are finished.
Q592 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Particularly
on coconuts!
Ms Dibb: You are right; there is a lot of education
that can be done on this. When is it important, when is the best-before
date just because it is not going to be too old and dried and
shrivelled, and when is it a real food safety issue?
Q593 Baroness Platt of Writtle: You
can judge that yourself. You do not need a sell-by date to tell
you that.
Ms Dibb: There are other things that we need
to look at about how we have got ourselves into this situation.
Part of that, in our view, is the way that retailers encourage
us to buy more food than we need. A good example of that is two-for-one
offers or other special offers. We have a retail model that is
highly competitive about giving us these good deals on food. We
know from the work that we have done in visiting some of the suppliers
to supermarkets, that they are the ones that bear the costs of
many of these two-for-one offers, that they know that that food
is going to rot, and particularly when it is based around fresh
food. Is that a responsible retailing model, we would ask, when
we are also trying to address the issue of food waste? We are
not saying it is all about just two-for-one offers, but it is
an example where we think that industry ought to get together
to think about whether there are other ways in which they can
offer value to customers that is not contributing to food waste.
Q594 Lord Crickhowell: What are the
roles of Government, business and the consumer in all this? What
is the balance between the two or the three in getting this working?
Ms Dibb: Government clearly has a role as an
enabler. Government in its own statement has expressly set out
what some of that means. I think in our submission we have given
you the four-E diagram of how it can enable and play a role. In
terms of a roadmap, we see a key role for Government as being
this convenor. Business obviously brings its expertise; it brings
its own experience and its responsibility and commitment. We have
seen sectors of business now, not just the retailers but other
sectors of business, saying: yes, we see the opportunities here,
both in terms of our customers and also now in terms of our shareholders
addressing the appropriate rate of sustainability issues for their
business. Quite clearly, consumers have a role too. We have talked
about the limitations and expectations of what the consumers can
realistically be expected to do. We also know from the research
that has been done on consumers that on many of these issues,
particularly waste—waste is really high on the consumers'
agenda—what they need business and Government to do is to
make it easier for them to be able to make more appropriate choices.
Of course there is a role for civil society organisations and
academics to come together.
Q595 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Do you not worry that the Government's whole macro economic model
is not predicated too much on greening and not enough on saving
perhaps? It does seem to me a sheer absurdity to encourage people
to go out and buy goods and then they have to buy themselves storage
space in which to put them. The fastest growing area is these
yellow storage places. This is a society which is now so affluent
that it is buying all kinds of things and yet we cannot afford
not to.
Mr Lee: That is absolutely right, and there
is quite a fundamental issue. If you break that down a bit, what
is the link between economic growth, consumption, a lot of which
is unsustainable in terms of energy and materials, and the need
to generate a tax base to pay for public services? That is one
of the areas that we are looking at and will be publishing something
on later this year. You are right; we have to get into those fundamentals
as well. A society which is predicated on economic growth, which
means continually increased consumption, cannot be sustainable.
Economic activity is a different matter altogether. A lot of the
things we are talking about today would provide all sorts of economic
activity and models for business and social enterprise, but we
have to look at that as well. Then you get into the fundamentals
of: what do we all consume; what are these products for; what
are they doing for us beyond what it says in the tin? There is
the product level and the very practical level we have talked
a lot about today in the interventions. There is also a broader
issue about: there is no point having the most sustainable product
in the world if you have 26 of them in your home and you have
four televisions, even though the televisions are more efficient.
It is absolute level of consumption as well as product design,
and that is a really tough one. We are going to have to get into
that.
Q596 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
It is a very tough one. It perhaps explains why the Treasury is
so keen on some of these things.
Mr Lee: Absolutely, and they are knocking on
the door.
Q597 Baroness Platt of Writtle: The
Sustainable Development Commission comments that Government performance
in terms of waste reduction is variable—you said it varied
across departments—and that some departments lack the baseline
data. What further research or work should be undertaken to enable
departments to provide this information accurately and to ensure
that the targets set are both challenging and achievable and not
a straightjacket?
Mr Lee: The history is shocking. If you go and
talk to the Office of Government Commerce they will tell you how
shocking. They now have to deal with this on behalf of the Treasury,
so the level of information, the quality of the information about
some of these things, is appallingly bad. There are very basic
things like which bits of departments do you include and which
not—magistrates' courts come in, MoD sells off through Qinetiq.
I would say, in fairness, there is a serious drive now to get
this sorted. Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell has now decided that
this is a reputational issue of Government's competence and so
there is a lot of work now being done to get that baseline together,
from which you can then set targets. At the moment, the trouble
is we are saying you should set more ambitious targets but many
Government departments are struggling to meet the targets they
have anyway. On waste they are sort of doing okay, but that is
because the waste targets are not very ambitious and because they
are not driving it through procurement and other things. It will
take a long time to do this. We talked to every individual Government
department in detail about this at the SDC because they have to
present their plans to us. It is a requirement of the Sustainable
Development Strategy. They confess; there are small teams of people
in these departments struggling with this stuff, desperately trying
to get the information together, but compared with the best performance
in some areas of business, they are miles behind. It is going
to be a complete culture change to get the data, set the realistic
targets and then find the leadership and action inside departments
to make this happen. We think it is so important because it is
not just the direct impact those departments are having; it is
the leadership. How you can say to the rest of society, "We
are going to have a Climate Bill that says you reduce year-on-year
emissions to get to this target and, by the way, we cannot do
it on our own operations". It just does not stack up.
Q598 Baroness Platt of Writtle: I
think you are talking about a long-term thing, are you not? Every
page of your roadmap is long-term. I think it is this encouragement
that is important, but some witnesses have commented that Government
procurement polices are sometimes too prescriptive and do not
adequately take into account the needs of small businesses, which
may be competing for procurement contracts, and some things will
be contradictory to others, which I think is difficult. Is there
a need to make procurement policies more practical and focused
to foster innovation and allow small businesses the chance to
compete?
Mr Lee: In fairness, I do not know what other
witnesses have said about this. The Sustainable Procurement Taskforce
was an almost exhaustive and very inclusive process. I think it
is about implementing those recommendations. There are these quick
wins; there is a framework which departments are supposed to use
to tackle this. It is recognised that you do not want to pursue
sustainability but exclude small suppliers, for instance. I really
think it is a question of getting on with it, to be honest. Part
of the issue is about skills and knowledge and capacity within
departments.
Q599 Baroness Platt of Writtle: And
flexibility, I would say.
Mr Lee: Yes.
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