TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2000

MR ROGER HOCKNEY AND MR ANDREW PRICE

  165. Welcome to the final session. Can I ask you to identify yourselves for the record please?

  (Mr Hockney) Good morning, Chairman. My name is Roger Hockney, I am Assistant Director of Environmental Planning in the Planning and Transportation Department of Leicestershire County Council. I am here today as the Chairman of the Planning Officers Society's Waste Planning Advisory Group.
  (Mr Price) My name is Andrew Price, Sir. I am the Head of Planning for Dorset County Council, I am here today as the Vice-Chairman of the Minerals and Waste Topics Group of the Planning Officers Society.

  166. Does Waste Strategy 2000 give you the lead you need on waste issues? Does it give you the guidance you need?
  (Mr Hockney) The Planning Officers Society certainly welcome the National Waste Strategy and see it as an important step in the right direction in terms of dealing with sustainable waste management in Great Britain, however, we believe that it does not give a clear policy guide to planning officers when they are seeking to make recommendations to their members about planning applications. We have to deal with planning applications, Chairman, and the bottom line, as far as the Planning Officers Society is concerned, is the determination of those applications and the desire to ensure where they conform with planning guidance those applications are granted permission. We do not believe, as it is written at the moment, the National Waste Strategy sets out clear and detailed enough guidance for planning officers in determining planning applications. We believe the Government really needs to come clean in quite clearly specifying the implications of the National Waste Strategy in terms of the types of facilities that will be needed to meet the waste reduction targets which are required.
  (Mr Price) The planning system of course has two parts, one is making development planning policy and the other part is development control. The development plans process, I would argue, is a very important part of that. The Landfill Directive has been signed by this Government, there are inevitably major changes to current waste management practice which must be introduced, and there will be a lot of implications for new forms of development. There is a lack of clarity, in our view, in the strategy as it is presently framed on how this country is to move towards the changes that must come, how the requirements of the Directive will be implemented.

  167. Can I just ask you whether you have taken up your concerns with the Government? Have you documented the perceived failings?
  (Mr Hockney) Yes, Chairman. The Planning Officers Society both advises the Local Government Association and, of course, the Association has its own dialogue with Government, and those concerns have been expressed by the Planning Officers Society to the Local Government Association. Indeed, there are a number of very valuable officer working groups between representatives of the Planning Officers Society and officers of Government, particularly of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, where we seek to convey our concerns and help civil servants from DETR to understand the practical issues related to the implementation of Government policy.

  168. You will be aware that the Government's attitude towards incineration has shifted from the draft to the Waste Strategy 2000 document. Has this made your life easier or harder in terms of knowing how to assess and how to qualify applications for incineration, for instance?
  (Mr Price) I think planning officers view incineration as one part of what will be required in terms of integrated waste management. Those of us who have been actively engaged in trying to prepare waste management strategy work on a non-statutory basis, so there may be some proper basis for waste local planning, have a fairly good understanding of what may be required in different parts of the country. I suspect that there will not be huge differences between areas, other than from their particular types or characteristics. Incineration certainly must be a part of any integrated waste management strategy and it is crucially important that there should be unambiguous guidance on all options, including incineration, in my view. I think there is ambivalence and, indeed, I would say back slipping from Making Waste Work.
  (Mr Hockney) I think to add to that, Chairman, it does make planning officers and planning committees' lives more difficult. Again, the bottom line is the determination of a planning application for an incinerator facility which may be the subject of a public inquiry, through call-in or whatever. Whilst the planning officers may seek to support that proposal, they may well not be able to bring in defence of that support, firm Government guidance which states categorically that incineration is supported.

  169. Do you have any view whether the Government's targets in relation to recycling, for instance, are realistic, given the problems that are encountered when trying to gain planning permission, not just for an incineration plant but any type of recycling facility? We have already heard one Member say that there will be an incineration plant in his constituency over his dead body. He did not quite say that but that seemed to be the clear implication. What is your response?
  (Mr Price) I think it is quite right that virtually any type of waste facility—it is the name that creates the difficulty—will attract opposition that is quite vehement and even more so as you go up the scale of facilities. In terms of the targets, my comment would be that they are being introduced in a strange way with the Audit Commission best value performance indicators in relation to recycling and composting. I hope that they meet the full target range for the audience that ought to be seeing those. Certainly as far as local authorities are concerned they are put into three bands. At the lower end authorities need to organise themselves so that they can double and then redouble recycling by 2003 and 2005. That will be quite difficult for them. I represent an authority which has a very high recycling performance and I can only say that that is shaky ground to be on. We are quite concerned that the implications are major increases in recyclable and compostable materials coming on to undeveloped markets around the country. I think there will be a lot of problems. As far as the planning system is concerned, yes, of course there will be more facilities of those types and those will be probably contentious.

  170. Noting the unpopularity amongst the public of incineration, your Society has gone on to say "recycling and composting are no more popular with members of the public". Have you a scale of public reaction to this? To what extent in popularity terms does an incinerator, a recycling depot or a composting system fall?
  (Mr Hockney) I think, Chairman, the situation we face is a serious situation. Any waste management proposal that is put before members of the public, whether it be incineration or composting, or a waste transfer station, all raise public concerns of one scale or another. Clearly incineration is the one that many people have at the front of their minds but I, and my colleague officers, have numerous examples of public concerns relating to fairly innocuous operations, with respect, such as green composting.

  171. Forgive me, but your Society is quoted as saying "no more than" incineration. Would you like to review that? Do you think that really is the case? If a composting facility is going to go in a field, do you think they would raise equal objection to an incineration plant on the edge of their town?
  (Mr Price) In my comments I made the point there is a difference in terms of scale and in terms of activity.

  172. Yes.
  (Mr Price) The point that we have been anxious to make to you is that it is the name "waste" that is causing a lot of the problems. If we were to move into something that was about resource recovery we might begin to see some change. There is a huge requirement, in our view, for public information and awareness to really change attitudes and minds.

  173. Is it not the case though that waste disposal authorities tend to be consulting and mooting incineration very early on because they say there is such a long lead-in time for an incineration proposal as opposed to MRF, materials recycling facilities, or composting or recycling in other ways? Do you honestly think that it would be an advantage to consult openly and well before time with the public in terms of other types of waste management? I am talking here of reuse, which we have not really touched on today, recycling and composting. Quite frankly, I as a member of the public and other people I speak to do not hear very much from any waste disposal authority on these other issues, these other alternatives, but we do hear a lot about looking for sites for incinerators.
  (Mr Hockney) I think that consulting is a vitally important element in the exercise. Early consultation, consultation by applicants for planning permission before the application has gone in, consultation with the local community that may or may not be affected, to share with them the emerging thoughts of that applicant about the proposal. I would go one step back from that and say, as I think Andrew Price has commented, there is a major public information education exercise required here and it really needs to be led up front by the Government. The only parallel that I can draw is the drink and drive campaign that is led nationally.

  174. I am talking about the waste strategy for a waste disposal authority, not a planning application, that is rather too late. These go on for years. The question is, should we not have more public consultation about the strategy and alternatives to waste disposal, as well as composting, recycling and reuse, at that stage rather than just talking about incinerators and where they might be?
  (Mr Price) Absolutely and without any question about it, Chairman. The problem we have is that planning, with a small P, for waste management does not exist in this country in the way it should, in my view and in the view of my colleagues.

  175. Take the case of Redhill, Redhill has a population, if you include Reigate, of the order of 20,000 in a county of about a million people, and it is now, through the planning process and applications going in, going to add to the landfill site which at the moment takes the equivalent of half the waste of Surrey each year. It will have an incinerator which will then mean it could take waste equivalent to the whole of Surrey's waste every year, plus another bulking depot close by. How should the planning process then ensure the pain is properly spread around the community so these depots and sites are not concentrated in one particular area?
  (Mr Price) That is a very taxing question. Looking at the county area, one should be looking to the Integrated Waste Management Strategy I spoke of before. There will be a need for quite a broad range of facilities—local recycling facilities, civic amenity sites, transfer stations—and it is the major treatment and disposal facilities which always attract the difficulties. I do not think I can say more clearly one would expect to see these things well distributed in relation to the population they are intending to serve and on a scale appropriate to that. I think it is difficult for me to comment on the particulars relating to your constituency area.

  176. It was really on the principle of concentration of pain.
  (Mr Price) There are two principles that the planning system is invoked to apply which are relevant to that, one of course being proximity and the other, a more difficult concept, regional self-sufficiency. The proximity principle is really the point I was trying to get across in my initial reply.

  177. We have been told in evidence that one is looking at five to ten years to get planning permission for an incinerator, is there anything which can be done to reduce that timescale in planning terms?
  (Mr Price) Five to ten years relates to the whole process from the idea first forming in the minds of those who are seeking to change waste management practice, through the planning and consultation processes, to the point where sites are identified and applications submitted, and then on towards construction, so five to ten years is probably a realistic timescale for that sort of major decision to be achieved.

  178. One of the concerns, and we have been debating it this morning, is whether there is a need for all this incineration capacity depending on the success of other ways of disposing of waste. Do you have a view on how as a community and society we try and run those two things side-by-side?
  (Mr Hockney) In the first instance, Chairman, if we are going to ensure we bite into the targets which are set out in the National Waste Strategy, then one line of argument is that we need to adopt those technologies which are proven. The Planning Officers Society have not taken a view on any particular technology and certainly our evidence does not suggest we favour incineration as opposed to recycling or composting, we are there to determine those applications when they are made. The inevitability, dare I say, of being driven down the incineration route is there if we are to achieve the targets which have been set in the National Waste Strategy. Research is well under way, and I am told certainly pilot projects are soon to be in place in respect of pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion and so on, and one would hope that work could be done on those and perhaps further pilot projects developed, but at the moment we are looking at proven technologies however critical we may be of them in terms of the concern over emissions from incinerators. So I think the view that the Planning Officers Society would take is that in order to achieve a National Waste Strategy composting, incineration and recycling are going to come into play. The one which is likely to bite the most into the target and seek to achieve it is, possibly, incineration.

  179. Because you do not think we can reach the recycling levels which would make that unnecessary?
  (Mr Price) Not necessarily, Chairman. I think the targets which are set for those authorities which are already further ahead are very demanding—because an increase on high figures is difficult to achieve—but overall one would certainly hope that 25 per cent nationally would be achieved. The dilemma comes in that national waste is certainly growing, it is alleged to be at 3 per cent—