1.0  BACKGROUND

  1.1  Robert Long Consultancy Ltd (RLCL) is a specialist professional practice comprising geologists, engineers, environmental scientists, surveyors and economists, advising the industry, landowners, central and local government, on all aspects of waste management and mineral extraction. By virtue of the nature of such work the practice is in daily contact with Officers of the Environment Agency in many parts of the UK.

  1.2  The key areas where staff from this practice interface with the Agency are in its role as:-

—  statutory consultee in Town and Country Planning matters;

—  Waste Management Licensing Authority, and

—  a source of information in respect of due diligence studies, environmental audits or market research.

  1.3  We readily acknowledge that the Agency has faced a very great challenge in bringing together staff from three disparate predecessor organisations and we believe that the organisation is making substantial strides towards achieving its stated goals. However, as a result of our contact with the Agency throughout England and Wales we are aware of a high level of inconsistency of approach between Regions and some key issues where the organisation is failing nationally to provide an adequate service.

  1.4  The following paragraphs deal with our experiences under the three areas of contact outlined above.

2.0  PLANNING

  2.1  The current Agency approach to consultation on planning matters, whether they be formal or informal, is to direct all enquiries through a Planning Liaison Officer. This Officer then circulates all of the Departments of the Agency which he/she considers may have interests which could be affected by the development. This process of distribution, internal consultation, collation and response, invariably takes far longer than for any other consultee in the planning process.

  2.2  For many developments the key issue on which an Agency view is required is readily identifiable and yet the Agency are in some areas hostile to the principle of direct contact between developers and departmental representatives on planning consultation. In some areas the Agency has been unwilling to confirm matters in writing when such contact has been made and issues agreed with individual Officers. It is, however, the inordinate delay in responses which is the main frustration in this area.

3.0  LICENSING

  3.1  There appears to be a growing problem of high levels of staff turnover in the Waste Regulation sections of many Regions of the Agency. This is leading to a dissipation of the knowledge base and a lack of continuity in understanding the history and development of many waste facilities.

  3.2  Newly appointed site inspection staff appear to have been instructed in many areas to carry out a strict checklist approach to inspection with minimal contact with operators. There appears to be a noticeable resistance to learning and understanding the processes and activities under inspection and decreasing pragmatism in decision making.

  3.3  In some areas, especially those with higher levels of staff turnover, there is a tangible reluctance to establish working relationships with Officers of the Mineral Planning Authority. Developers and their Agents should not have to act as conduits for communications between two regulatory organisations.

  3.4  In respect of Hydrogeological Risk Assessments under Regulation 15 of the Licensing Regulations, we do not believe that the Agency has sufficient adequately trained staff to carry out their duties effectively. In parallel there is an unwillingness, or possibly an inability, to seek external assistance on such matters. This leads to long delays and prevarication by Officers who have been given a level of responsibility inconsistent with their competence.

  3.5  There is a great variation in the administrative standards of Agency offices between, and even within, Regions. Submissions to the Agency are mislaid, fail to be acknowledged or are examined only cursorily. Often on second rounds of consultation issues are raised which could have been dealt with in the first round.

  3.6  In detailed negotiations with Agency Officers on technical design issues, reference is often made to draft internal technical guidance documents. Many Agency staff maintain that such documentation cannot be released for industry consideration but copies leak out on an ad hoc basis in any event. There needs to be a faster more structured approach to producing draft guidance which can then be presented to industry for consultation purposes, via an organisation such as ESA.

4.0  INFORMATION

  4.1  Access to, and provision of, information is the area of Agency activity which displays perhaps the widest degree of inconsistency across the country. We have experienced numerous examples of situations where the geographical spread of an area we are studying straddles an Agency Regional boundary. Some Regions provide all of the information we require by telephone and fax, for no charge and the information is demonstrably up-to-date. By contrast, an adjacent Region may be unaware of the information it holds and may require an up front fee simply to check whether any records exist. Information for which significant fees are required sometimes transpires to be completely out of date and therefore useless.

  4.2  The Public Register was intended to be an important source of information regarding licensed waste facilities for all interested parties. When such Registers were controlled by individual Waste Regulation Authorities there was great national variation in the standards of the documentation. In our experience, whilst the level of information has improved at some Agency offices the disparity between offices has not improved at all. Whilst this is perhaps not the most urgent of issues for the Agency it is one by which the organisation could readily demonstrate its aspirations towards national standards.

  4.3  Agency regional and local area structure is complex and it seems it is not always properly understood by its own staff. Waste regulation boundaries often differ from water catchment boundaries and again from local Government administrative boundaries. This makes for a very complex system, which is further complicated in some areas, like the Hampshire and South Wessex border where knowledge is very patchy and often resides in offices which cover a different area, not the office it should. Despite all this, maps showing the relationship of area/regional/local authority boundaries are very hard to come by. These should be readily available and publicised.

  4.4  As a regionalised organisation, the Agency's web site should be a uniting tool, bringing everything together. The Agency web site is quite good, but is consistently out-performed by SEPA's. For instance, Producer Responsibility Explanatory Notes (PRENs) are issued jointly by the Agencies, but Agency site is very out-of-date (by at least 12 months) and has only a handful of PRENs available, whilst SEPA has all available and additionally has the list of accredited reprocessors available. The agency's chosen method of distributing the list of accredited reprocessors is to send a disk through the post, instead of allowing free and immediate access to this public information. On a similar note, Special Waste Explanatory Notes (SWENs) and consultation documents would be better distributed via the Internet than in hard copy. The Internet provides much freer and immediate access to such information.

5.0  OTHER ISSUES

  5.1  The Agency has not set aside a budget to identify companies potentially obligated under the Packaging Waste Regulations from 2000 when the turnover threshold falls to £2million. The Agency expect existing publicity to have raised awareness amongst these newly obligated companies. Whether awareness is high or low, the Agency have not prepared themselves to make contact with, and give guidance to, these companies this year (when companies should be collecting data on their packaging flows, etc), nor are they well prepared to take enforcement action, if necessary, from the turn of the year.

  5.2  In retrospect we believe that Senior Agency staff have focussed too much on the formulation of the plethora of Guidance Notes, which have emerged in the last 12-18 months. Whilst policy matters have received a high priority this has been to the detriment of the overall performance of the organisation. We believe that the Agency's highest priority now is to motivate and retain existing experienced staff and to recruit new staff with the necessary specialist skills, whilst continuing to offer an important training ground for new graduate entrants.

October 1999