Lord Whitty of Camberwell told a Lords debate on Wednesday (May 9, 2007) that Defra had based its decision to refuse Mayor Ken Livingstone control of London's waste disposal on one report from consultancy firm KPMG.
”There is no clear public accountability in London for the strategic disposal of waste.
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– Lord Whitty
But as he was in Defra's inner ministerial circle as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State up until 2005, Lord Whitty said other research had backed the argument for a single body to co-ordinate the capital's recycling efforts.
Lord Whitty said: “The KPMG report, which I have at least glanced at, seems to differ substantially from earlier analyses that were made to Defra and the GLA, on the possibility of efficiencies in waste disposal through contracting and through more efficient regulation, and for the driver that it would produce in relation to better collection and recycling methods in the boroughs.”
The peer said with joint waste disposal authorities rather than the elected Mayor running waste disposal services, there was “no clear public accountability in London for the strategic disposal of waste”.
The comments came within a debate on Wednesday in which Lord Whitty was ultimately unsuccessful in attaching a single waste disposal authority for London to the GLA Bill, which is rapidly moving towards a conclusion in Parliament.
Defra's Parliamentary Under secretary Lord Rooker had said in the debate concerning the government's opposition to the single waste authority: “Having examined the detailed evidence following a consultation, the Government have come to the view that a single waste disposal authority would not deliver improvements in waste management or cost efficiencies.
“A single waste disposal authority could result in extra costs to the Government and to the boroughs, and could put our landfill diversion targets at risk. If the UK failed to meet its targets, the resulting fines would be likely to be passed to London’s council tax bills,” Lord Rooker said.
Recycling
Lord Whitty said during the debate that Defra was wrong to argue against the authority on the basis of progress being made by the boroughs towards recycling targets.
He pointed out that four years ago, London had a recycling rate four percentage points below the average for other English regions, and this year the gap has grown to six percentage points.
Lord Whitty revealed: “I tried to obtain the latest information on what actually happened in 2006-07. I could not get it for all the boroughs, but six out of the seven boroughs for which it was available showed a very small improvement, a slow down in improvement, and one borough showed a significant retrogressive move. So I do not think that we have achieved the step change.”
He said that the government needed a “plan B”, since “leaving it to the boroughs and the present structure is frankly not working”.
Defra's minister in the Lords, Lord Rooker, had written to fellow peers outlining the government's opposition to the single waste disposal authority prior to this week's hearing of the Lords' Grand Committee.
But Lord Whitty dismissed the letter's statement that “London is doing well in relation to landfill”.
He said: “There has been a welcome reduction in the past full year in relation to the amount going to landfill. But it is still substantially higher than it was three years ago, and some of the performances by individual London boroughs are still pretty bad. Some boroughs are in the bottom 10%, and some have missed their most recent targets by over 10%.”
Timing
Lord Whitty went on to point out that the government's view that changing London's waste disposal arrangements because of fears of disrupting present efforts towards the Landfill Directive in 2010 and 2013, was a “strange argument, because it is essentially about timing”.
He said: “As Sir Nicholas Stern and others have pointed out, it is much better to act sooner rather than later in relation to environmental problems, all of which are linked to the wider problem of climate change. If the structure is wrong, we should change it as early as possible.”
The arguments failed to win enough support within the Grand Committee, however, with peers including Baroness Hanham and Baroness Hamwee stating that they were not satisfied that the proposal for the single waste disposal authority had a sufficient business plan behind it, and that how current contract arrangements would change had not been addressed.
It is thought that there may be one last chance for an amendment to be debated by the full House of Lords, but otherwise the Mayor will have to seek other ways to secure his single waste disposal authority.
One possibility could be that he will test the idea directly with the public within his Mayoral manifesto, in the Mayoral elections in 2008.
Fund
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Baroness Harnham said during the GLA Bill debate that the discussion over the single waste authority was concealing the slow progress being made by government towards the promised 25 million recycling fund for London.
She said: “All this debate on a single waste authority has obscured the fact that it is now almost 10 months since the government announced that the London waste and recycling forum would be created. There is no sign of this new body or any indication of how it is to be set up, nor has there been any word on what is happening about the new fund which the forum would administer.”
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