Examination of Witnesses (Questions 780-787)
Ms Gilli Hobbs and Mr Andrew Swain
6 MAY 2008
Q780 Lord Bhattacharyya: Has the
cost gone up because the plans are mandatory now?
Mr Swain: I do not think it has, no. As I was
saying earlier, the important thing is to get the clients, designers
and contractors to think about the waste they are going to produce
and then to monitor against it. The benchmarking is key to that.
If used properly, then you can review the pattern: Why did we
not meet our expectations? Why have we failed in those particular
areas?
Q781 Lord Bhattacharyya: If I were
a contractor, I would say, "I have got to do all this mandatory
stuff, I'm going to raise it by 10 per cent." How does he
decide whether it is 10 per cent, 5 per cent, or 15 per cent?
Or is it the blind leading the blind?
Mr Swain: Yes, contractors could do that, but
I think the purpose of it is to improve performance. If the contractor
did it like that, then he would be fooling himself and not playing
in the spirit of the game—although I am sure there are those
people out there—but the client should have an involvement
in it as well.
Ms Hobbs: The reason why the threshold was set
at £300,000 is because the impact studies showed that was
the point at which the cost of writing a Site Waste Management
Plan and implementing it was exceeded by the financial benefits
from having a Site Waste Management Plan. That is why we have
the £300,000 threshold.
Q782 Earl of Selborne: All new homes
now have to be rated against the Code for Sustainable Homes, which
measures their sustainability against nine categories of sustainable
design, one of which is waste. Do you think that enough weight
is given to the waste category in the overall assessment and how
accurate do you think the assessments will be at indicating the
true sustainability of the project?
Ms Hobbs: The Code for Sustainable Homes is
a residential equivalent of BREEAM. It is a government code. Again,
you have these different sections within it which are weighted
in accordance to what is considered to be their relative importance.
Within the Code for Sustainable Homes, the waste aspect has 6.4
per cent of the weighting for the overall code whereas energy
is 36 per cent—which I think you would probably expect,
given the carbon reduction targets. We have a very difficult target
to meet in terms of carbon reduction and you would expect the
energy aspect to be weighted accordingly. In terms of whether
or not there is enough weight, the code could really drive people
towards waste reduction, if there were mandatory levels that you
have to meet within the code. There are mandatory levels for energy,
water and waste, but the mandatory level for waste is that you
have to have a Site Waste Management Plan. The Site Waste Management
Plans are now mandatory anyway, so the only enhancement upon what
is already law is to measure the waste in greater detail. You
get additional credits for reducing waste and for diverting waste
from landfill. When you get into the higher levels of the code,
code levels 5 and 6, it is very difficult to get to those levels
without trying to get all the credits you possibly can, so any
developers trying to get to code 5 or 6 will automatically try
to get the additional credits on the waste section. They will
really try to get the credit for reducing waste and they will
really try to get the credit for recycling because there is a
cost saving to them. Ultimately there should be a cost saving,
so it would be silly not to try to get those credits. The weighting
might be low, but at the higher levels you really have to try
to get every single credit you can.
Q783 Earl of Selborne: How do you
think that developers of new homes view these codes? Do you think
they will have an incentive to go for these higher classifications?
Ms Hobbs: They are having to. As Andrew was
saying, it is back to the client. If they specify a code level
5 or 6, then they will have to design to that level.
Q784 Earl of Selborne: And that is
driven by the purchaser.
Mr Swain: Yes. My only concern with the code
is, again, coming back to smaller companies: companies which do
not need to produce a Site Waste Management Plan get the credit
by default, as I understand it. I would like to see them challenged
in some way so that they would have to produce a Site Waste Management
Plan, even though they are not required by law. I think that would
get them thinking about waste as an issue for them.
Q785 Lord Haskel: Another way the
Government has tried to improve things is through the roadmaps
that Defra are creating in their Market Transformation Programme.
They have a roadmap for plasterboard, resulting in the setting
of targets to increase the recycling of plasterboard waste. Do
you think this is a success? How was the industry involved in
this?
Ms Hobbs: I was involved with this from start
to finish through the Market Transformation Programme. It is the
other way around, to be honest. We did the work on the waste aspect,
quantifying how much waste was produced now and how much into
the future. We could see that there was a rising impact and so
we worked with the industry to think about how those impacts could
be reduced realistically. The industry was very proactive and
went to Defra and suggested a voluntary agreement for reducing
the amount of plasterboard that was produced and diverted waste
from landfill. That has basically been agreed with the manufacturers.
We are currently working with the contractors who install the
plasterboard, along with the resource management industry and
also the demolition industry, to have equivalent agreements for
plasterboard in terms of reducing the amount of waste produced
and diverting it from landfill. Defra have since looked at plasterboard
in its wider sense, in terms of how we reduce the environmental
impact of plasterboard, through a roadmap. Waste is one environmental
impact of many we really need to consider. The industry working
on reducing its waste is a very good starting point and the roadmap
is hopefully going to look at other environmental impacts that
can be targeted as well. If there were big impacts, a similar
agreement should be set up to reduce that impact as well.
Q786 Lord Haskel: Is this going to
apply to other products apart from plasterboard?
Ms Hobbs: A sensitive point, really. We are
working on these other product groups within the Market Transformation
Programme. We were going through the same process of gathering
information, showing whether there was an increasing impact, looking
at actions to reduce those impacts, and then, potentially, a voluntary
agreement with roofing products, flooring products, insulation,
windows, and modern methods of construction. Unfortunately, because
of budgetary constraints, they do not have enough money to look
at everything, so they are focusing much more on energy-using
products. The work that has been carried out on these other products,
non energy-using construction products, has been stopped, basically.
It is a very powerful way to do things, but it is not going to
be going ahead through the Market Transformation Programme in
the foreseeable future, and so we transferred that work into another
programme called the Construction Resources and Waste Platform,
whereby we are going to look at two additional products and try
to get voluntary agreements for them. We are hoping that one will
be insulation and the other will be bricks and blocks.
Q787 Lord Haskel: But is it your
commercial pressures to reduce the amount of plasterboard waste
and the bricks and the block waste that you are telling us about?
Surely there are commercial pressures to do it?
Ms Hobbs: Yes, which is why the industry is
very proactive in coming forward and working with the Government
to identify what can be done, but they would rather do it at a
national level rather than try to do it individually.
Chairman: We have covered all the areas that we want
to cover, but as ever we will probably think of something afterwards
so we might want to write to you; and equally if there is anything
that you want to supplement our questions with we would be more
than happy to take any additional information. Obviously we will
be in touch with Mr Brock as he has not been able to attend today
and we will try and arrange for him to have sight of the evidence
and if there is anything that he would wish to supplement it with
we will be happy to accept that too. Thank you very much for your
time.
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