MS TRICIA HENTON, MS LIZ PARKES AND MR MALCOLM FERGUSSON

18 DECEMBER 2008

  Q140  Lord Howie of Troon: You suggested that there was considerable waste in the construction industry. As a civil engineer, I am wondering just how much goes straight to landfill.

  Ms Parkes: Figures show that one-third of what goes onto sites comes straight off again, perhaps not immediately but ends up as waste that is not post-demolition waste, it is just because it has been overpurchased, overspecified or damaged. Again, this is us getting into the areas we think can have an impact, but what we are not directly charged with is working with the construction sector. We are drafting a construction sector plan and we have also been working with Government on the concept of site waste management plans which is, again, a voluntary approach at the moment, trying to get industry to take greater responsibility for what they are buying and what they are throwing away and being responsible about it. Defra have recently consulted on making those mandatory, so really it is trying to encourage above certain thresholds that contractors really do have to think much more about this because we do need to take action on every level.

  Q141  Lord Howie of Troon: You do surprise me. I must say, I do not know if the figures are believable.

  Ms Parkes: They are figures that we have obtained from elsewhere.

  Q142  Lord Howie of Troon: I know the figures are there.

  Ms Parkes: It is staggering if it is true and, even if it is not, a third is a lot. Even if it is only ten per cent that is still ten per cent too much wastage[1]

  Q143Chairman: There is also work being done by the NAO on the sustainability of construction design which shows that the public sector has an appalling record. They were hard pushed to find any good examples of sustainable design in buildings that were constructed in the public estate up until about June last year.

  Ms Parkes: Certainly we had a couple of examples of buildings that we have procured that are flagship buildings, but they are the exception rather than the rule and it is something we need to do more.

  Q144  Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I wanted to come back because I think you are absolutely right that the role of consumers is a vital one here and one sees, for example, what I call "the plastic bag initiative" happening at the moment where quite a lot of change is taking place. I want to come to a point we had earlier on the packaging initiative because here, I believe I am right in saying, that, as a consumer, if we had the right to take packaging back and dump it on the supplier, if we were able to do that sort of thing, there is a great deal there. Take, for example, polystyrene peanuts. When I get a delivery of stuff in polystyrene peanuts, the only thing I can do with it is to put it into a black bag and send it off to landfill and yet that is an appalling thing to have to do, it could well be reused for packaging other things. Is the Packaging Directive working here?

  Ms Parkes: It is certainly encouraging recycling, whether it is doing enough to encourage minimisation and reduction at source. It is very challenging to set targets and to legislate and to measure whether or not we are achieving waste reduction. People tend to shout about it a bit more now, particularly if there is an economic saving there, they are likely to do it, but also we are seeing it is part of people's green credentials. Whilst there is that balance again between what actions we take that really impact on the environment and which ones are more totemic, so the plastic bag tax would be in itself not dealing with something that is a major source of environmental pollution, but if it does get people to change their behaviour and think about what they buy and what they throw away, then it can be a useful totemic measure in itself.

  Q145  Earl of Selborne: You made a very fair case that the concept of individual producer responsibility is really a bit unrealistic when you think of, for instance, the WEEE Directive-type products coming from all over the world, you are not going to be able to trace them back to individual producers, so we end up with the interim solution of collective producer responsibility. Is that going to ultimately undermine the concept of trying to get producers to carry the responsibility?

  Mr Fergusson: Yes. We said earlier that it does work reasonably well with cars for very good reasons: you have got a relatively limited number of identifiable brands and a very large piece of equipment that you can allocate back. I would say, though, if you take WEEE as a collective whole, then what we said before applies, but if one thinks of individual waste streams, computers, televisions, other major appliances, you do within a single stream have similar conditions where you do have most of the equipment manufactured by a recognisable number of brands. It seems to me that within that it ought to be possible in the course of time to move at least more towards a system where individual companies can be expected to take some responsibility for their own brand and that their reputation suffers if they fail to do that.

  Ms Parkes: We do think that we need to move the debate away from just looking at waste legislation, there have been a lot of initiatives at the European level to look both at end of pipe and upstream with producers and particular materials and products. The Commission has recognised through its thematic strategy it needs to take stock of that, things need to settle down and, coming back to the very good points that have been made, industry needs to understand what the rules are as they are now, we do think that the big gains to be made now are looking at product legislation. There is a limit to what you can achieve from a waste perspective and this needs to be looked at globally or at least at European level from a product perspective.

  Q146  Lord Howie of Troon: As was pointed out earlier on, this is a global matter. I am told there is a thing called the "United Nations Marrakech Process". Can you tell me what that is, what it hopes to achieve and has it been in any way successful?

  Ms Henton: I have to say we were rather intrigued by this point because we reckoned that if neither the Environment Agency nor IEEP could instantaneously identify what the Marrakech Process was, then maybe it was something that was carrying on in a bit of a vacuum. It is, we understand, a process that was signed in June 2003 in Marrakech and is looking at ways in which it can identify things like tools and policies that will move towards appropriate patterns of consumption, that it will develop production and consumption policies to improve products and services and so on and so forth, but it has now been around for four years and I am not entirely convinced that it is at the top of anybody's agenda, certainly not our organisation's.

  Chairman: It would not form part of our travelling commitments, I think, to go to Marrakech, attractive though that policy may be!

  Lord Howie of Troon: I am a good deal further forward than I was at the beginning of the day. Could I ask another question?

  Q147  Chairman: I think Mr Fergusson would like to come in.

  Mr Fergusson: I just have a comment. I have already commented on—and I fully agree with that conclusion, I must say—the inherent difficulty of taking things forward at a global level, plus in this case you are compounding that by having this rather general and nebulous concept of sustainable consumption and production, so you are compounding two reasons to suggest this is not likely to be very effective or important in the short term. Therefore, I repeat the argument, it is much more promising to look at European and national level actions and much more concrete initiatives rather than a general approach to SDP.

  Lord Howie of Troon: This sounds very much like the United Nations, Chairman. Could I ask another question?

  Chairman: Briefly.

  Q148  Lord Howie of Troon: Very briefly, you know me. We have two witnesses here from the Environment Agency, one dealing with environmental protection and the other dealing with waste. In the overall strategy of the Agency which of these two elements takes priority, the environment or dealing with waste?

  Ms Parkes: Perhaps to explain, I sit within the Environment Protection Directorate and it is about achieving the right outcomes for the environment by working with industry. What is fair to say is that we target the activities that are the most polluting rather than necessarily just those that can lead to waste minimisation because we are interested in the whole life cycle impact of waste, so it is not a question of one or the other.

  Q149  Lord Howie of Troon: It sometimes must be.

  Ms Parkes: There is no conflict, it is just terminology. Waste is one aspect of the environment that we are looking to protect, we also look to protect the air, land and water from the consequences of pollution, so we have a range of roles and waste is one aspect of that.

  Q150  Chairman: Very briefly on this question of the revision of the Waste Framework Directive. What do you think you would like to get out of that? I am not going to take an extended wish list and apple pie and all the rest of it, but what do you think realistically you would hope to get out of this revision?

  Ms Parkes: First, we would not want to see change for the sake of change, as I alluded to earlier, some things like the definition of waste we think have stood the test of time. What we would like to see is greater clarity on the end of waste criteria and we would hope to see an endorsement of the approach that we have been taking. In particular, the Commission has already issued guidance on the concept of by-products and that has been very well received by ourselves and industry and has allowed us to take further steps towards deregulating industrial by-products that could have a useful life. The other main area is that we do not want to see greater over-prescriptiveness because we do not want to see regulation as a barrier to more sustainable use of resources and sometimes there is a tendency for European legislation to get into the detail and we do believe that we need to keep it as an outcome-focused directive rather than very prescriptive. We think one of the initiatives there that is quite hopeful is the Waste Prevention Programme concept. Again, it does not need to be rigidly applied, but that is one that we think Defra would need to take forward with local and regional government and their responsibilities for the waste planning side. I should add that we are working very closely with Government on this and we sit on fora to advise Government to make sure that whatever is arrived at is practicable and delivers the right outcome for the environment.

  Q151  Chairman: We wish you well. I think it has to be said that many of us in the past have worried that when regulations come out of Brussels, the enthusiasm of British civil servants to copper-bottom them to make them prescriptive, to do everything that you are saying they should not be, they very often are because they seem to be at times preoccupied with the worry that there might be a judicial review and they get the blame for being too vague, so we wish you well. Mr Fergusson, you wanted to say something?

  Mr Fergusson: Just coming back on that point, obviously it is something we do quite a lot in our business and it tends to be somewhat of a Euro mythology sometimes to talk about copper-bottoming everything and there are often good reasons for putting extra things in actually which are not just about making it harder for people. I think in general terms I certainly agree that it should not be too prescriptive and perhaps one criticism is that historically there has been a bit too much focus on the waste hierarchy, a serious point which has been mentioned, which as a general principle works very well but if it is treated as an iron rule in every case it can lead you wrong, so we would like to see that as becoming one of a number of tools, such as the proximity principle and others that are applied. Another thing is inevitably the focus should move more towards the questions of waste prevention, resource efficiency and recovery and so forth. A third thing is we have just completed a piece of work on the statistics of waste and why they sometimes give a rather misleading picture because there are a lot of reasons why statistics from different countries turn out not to be at all comparable, so I think we would like to see a bit more evidence in the future on a better evidence base and the policy could be based on more realistic comparisons of what is really happening in different Member States.

  Chairman: Thank you very much on that point. Perhaps you could share with us that statistical study that you have been doing because I think that would be helpful from our point of view because we are bombarded with evidence and not all of it is as clear as we would like it to be and, certainly, to date not as clearly lucid as the evidence you have given us which has been extremely helpful. We are all talking piously about waste and we are now going off to create mountains of it over the next two and a half weeks or so. Could I wish everyone else a very pleasant Christmas and New Year. I will certainly see the Members back afterwards and thank you very much. If there is anything else that we need to get from you after the Christmas rush, we will drop you a line. If you think on reflection there is anything when you see the printed evidence you have given which you would like to clarify, then please feel free to do so, but we would appreciate it if you could send us these stats, that would be very helpful. Thank you very much.