Mr Neil Thornton, Mr Tony Pedrotti and Dr David Evans

27 NOVEMBER 2007

  Q60  Baroness Platt of Writtle: You left out schools. What are you doing with schools?

  Mr Thornton: I have to make the disclaimer first of all that schools are not the responsibility of my Department, it is now the Department for Children, Family and Schools.

  Q61  Baroness Platt of Writtle: Okay. I will reserve that question for them.

  Dr Evans: Let me say that the Sector Skills Council as well as my own Department is working very hard to try to attract school children to the discipline of design but also the whole area of science and engineering. My Department does put a lot of responsibility and a lot of its efforts behind attracting sufficient numbers of young people into science, technology and mathematics skills.

  Q62  Baroness Platt of Writtle: Do not forget that 52 per cent of the population is women and work with WISE. That is an interest, sorry.

  Dr Evans: Both women and men.

  Q63  Lord Haskel: If we could quickly move on to business support. The Business Resource Efficiency and Waste Programme has a number of different delivery bodies. We are told there is Envirowise, NISP, WRAP and MTP. Can you tell us how these various bodies work together and how businesses are guided to the right programme and how do you avoid duplication?

  Mr Thornton: Yes, gladly. I should probably use the phrase BREW, because it is shorter, for the Business Resource Efficiency and Waste Programme. The first thing to say about the BREW Programme is that it is simply a funding mechanism, so there is not somewhere a BREW thing. BREW is a process by which we allocate funds to bodies which contribute to business resource efficiency and waste performance. It has been hitherto funded from the landfill tax escalator funds and the future of BREW will come up in the next spending round. We, sitting as the secretariat of the BREW process, engaging other departments and external stakeholders, seek to look at proposals from various players who are out there in the delivery landscape, if you like. The main ones you have mentioned, I will briskly explain what they do. Envirowise is a contract as it happens with a provider, an environmental consultancy provider, which ensures that businesses have practical advice available to them about ways in which they can improve their environmental impacts, minimise waste and make profits. So they are looking for a business solution that will contribute to environmental outputs. They provide free, confidential and tailored advice through onsite visits and they have a helpline, a website and so on. If you like, they are an advisory service. They spend quite a lot of their time in the medium to small end of the business. The smaller ones would probably use materials that already exist. The Market Transformation Programme I have referred to quite a number of times already this morning is also an external contract with an expert provider and it focuses on improving resource efficiency of products used or potentially used by business. It is largely an information source, so it seeks and generates knowledge and information about environmental performance of particular product types and publishes that. It talks about the trajectory of future environmental benefits and, therefore, can help to inform standards making and so on. As I said earlier today, it both helps us in Government to understand products and where they might go and it helps the business community, consumers, green groups and so on. To some extent we use them almost as an arm of Government when we are talking about international negotiations, for example, on products, they can simply provide an expert service to us. The National Industrial Symbiosis Programme—I cannot claim all of these titles are terribly easy to absorb—is effectively an environmental marriage broker between businesses. The most classic example is where it identifies a business which has a waste material which will make an ideal input to another business's production. They do not limit themselves to physical goods, they can deal in waste heat and in other environmental waste. Effectively, they are bringing together businesses who, if they work together, can improve both their business output and environmental output. The Waste and Resources Action Programme, which is almost never so described, it is always referred to as WRAP, is a body we put on the pitch some years ago principally to improve the market for recyclable materials. There was recognition that there was a market failure and not only were people not showing an interest in recycling but there was not a market for the materials that could be generated out of recycling. Of course, some of those markets are overseas but they have been seeking to generate and are effectively operating a recyclable materials market. They also focus on improving waste performance in the business community at large. They have a very significant and rather successful initiative called the Courtauld Initiative in which they were working with the major retailers initially but now also some of the major food manufacturing companies, for example, to reduce food wastes, to reduce packaging in the chain. That is quite independent of the regulatory position where we place obligations sometimes. Those are the four most significant recipients but there are others that are eligible under the proposal. For example, there is a body called Action Sustainability which tries to encourage best procurement practice in the private sector amongst major private companies as opposed to the public procurement activity which we talked about earlier. You also asked how we avoid overlap and how simple it is for anybody to understand this position. We work very hard with the organisations and we are extremely angry if any of them is ever caught poaching, filching or fighting at the boundaries between them because you are right to detect that sometimes there are boundaries. We are seeking to establish a world in which they work collaboratively and co-operatively—for example, Envirowise and WRAP are working together on some construction propositions—and to hand off to each other and the Carbon Trust as well which is also a recipient. As part of the then Chancellor's initiative on business support simplification there is an intention that we should bring together the environmental supports that are available to the business community in a simpler to understand proposition, future environmental support for business. One of the approved mechanisms that will be presented during the course of the next year or two is one on business resource efficiency and waste. We will be seeking to make sure that there is a more straightforward and easier to understand front end for a business which happens to wake up one morning and says, "Actually, I would quite like to do something about all this", rather than waiting for one of my colleagues or delivery bodies to bang on their door.

  Q64  Lord Haskel: When they wake up one morning and say, "I want to do something about this", how do they find out what services are available?

  Mr Thornton: Obviously all of these bodies have active Web presences and they could come to this Department where our Web presence or anybody they talk to would be able to signpost them. Directgov and its business equivalent carry information about these bodies. We have done what we can to make information available now but it is not as good as it might be. We certainly hope that if a business goes into a Business Link or an RDA they will find out about these organisations. The expectation is the Business Link will always be one route available to business in the new model of the simplified business support.

  Q65  Earl of Selborne: My question was going to address the issues facing small and medium-sized enterprises. Clearly there is a problem of scale in implementing sustainable production processes.

  Mr Thornton: Yes.

  Q66  Earl of Selborne: Lord Crickhowell referred to some of the recommendations of the Design Council which call for greater support for design-led innovation that will enable SMEs to embed sustainability in all their products and services. Would you accept that is a sensible recommendation? What opportunities are there to transfer waste production knowledge from large organisations to SMEs?

  Mr Thornton: I will say a couple of things and Tony might well want to add something. I will not say whether I think the recommendations are sensible because David has said that he will be commenting on those already and will obviously be in touch with you about that. Our approach would not be fundamentally to say that there are different issues for large businesses and small businesses but there are clearly different capacities. Small businesses tend to be time poor and knowledge poor and will need simple routes to market and simple routes to get the information that may be available and will frequently need to use fairly off-the-peg advice or simple advice that they can get from the Business Link because there will not be sufficient capacity to provide hand-holding, as it were, although the Envirowise service is available to small businesses. Larger businesses will tend to have corporate social responsibility departments and in many cases will be handling more complicated environmental propositions. If you take a major retailer, they are obviously hugely influential in the environmental performance not only of themselves but of their supply chain and are very alert to the environmental demands coming forward from their consumers. We have already talked about the big businesses who run petrochemical plants and their relationship with the IPPC controls. What we seek to do is ensure that where a small business or a large business wants to feel more motivated, there are support mechanisms and regulatory regimes available to them that will work for them. Within that context BERR would be our proxy for the business community and the design of such things.

  Mr Pedrotti: The challenges an SME faces are completely different from a large business. Any support that the Government offers to SMEs is general on one level, but also we try to tailor it because if you tell an SME based where I live in South London regarding sustainable consumption and production, "This is how BP does it", you have lost them immediately because they will say, "BP is huge, it is not relevant to my business, I'm out the door". That is why Business Link and trade associations are more important as a mechanism to try and influence these people. Also not to be put off. I recently attended a business breakfast where it was just SMEs and when you talk to them and they understand it, they are up for doing something. It is that engagement with them rather than just, "Here's a leaflet dropped on you by a trade association". You have got to recognise their ability to do things is dependent on the resource side and the time side.

  Chairman: Thank you very much, gentlemen, that has been very helpful. As you know, this is our opening session so you have given us a backdrop. I think we will reserve the right to call your political masters or mistresses, I am not quite sure who all the ministers are these days. We will be asking them back but, it has to be said, that will not be any reflection on the quality of the answers that you have given us this morning because they have been very fulsome and very helpful. Thank you very much.