Northumberland is the sixth largest county in England, but its population of 310,000 is largely rurally based – almost three quarters of the county's land is used for agriculture and forestry. But despite the difficulties involved in providing rural waste management services, inspectors have given the council only one out of three stars for its waste management service.
“The service compares badly on recycling levels and the amount of waste that is landfilled,” the inspectors' report said. “Recycling and composting levels are still low; whilst performance has improved, this has been slower than anticipated.”
The county's household waste recycling rate is only 6.4%, with 94.6% of the annual 177,000 tonnes of municipal waste going to landfill. The Audit Commission report also said the council had insufficient education programmes in place to raise awareness on waste issues.
“We found only limited evidence that waste minimisation and awareness issues are included in new contracts,” inspectors said, “apart from the sale of waste materials from the HWRCs.”
Prospects
However, although the state of recycling in Northumberland is poor at the moment, there was some hope in the report that it would improve. The council has set up a partnership between district councils and has produced a Joint Municipal Waste
Management Strategy (JMWMS) with the addition of investment in waste management infrastructure.
Explaining its “promising” description for Northumberland's prospects for the future, inspectors wrote: “The council's improvement plan successfully balances short-term service improvements with the need for significant long-term capital investment.”
The council has statutory targets of 10% recycling by 2003-04 and 18% by 2005-06. It also has also set itself longer-term targets of 33% recycling by 2010 and 50% by 2020 with a reduction in landfilling to 20% by 2020.
The Audit Commission praised the council for investments including the 1,000,000 new waste transfer station – opening in the Alnwick district in 2003 – and for spending 272,000 to re-open six household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) that had been closed due to a lack of funds and 400,000 for other waste facilities.
Fund
Some of the funds will come from DEFRA's 140m Waste Minimisation and Recycling Fund – Northumberland won 363,000 to improve kerbside collection and 403,000 to enhance HWRC facilities.
Commenting on the inspectors' findings, the County's executive member for environment, Alan Cutter, said: “I am delighted that the Audit Commission have recognised the fact that waste management is a top priority for the authority and indeed we have set aside increased financial support to ensure that our targets are realised.”
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