John Enright, the former recycling manager at the London Borough of Camden and current operations director at London Remade will head up the unit.
Mr Enright presented the aims of the unit at a meeting of the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee in Birmingham yesterday.
He explained: “What we are here to do is help local authorities – if they need it – to reach their statutory obligations and respond to the requirements of the Landfill Directive.”
English local authorities have to reach an average household recycling target of 17% by the end of 2003-04 and 25% by 2005-06. Mr Enright explained that his team will be looking at a number of measures to help councils achieve this. The average English household waste recycling rate was 12.4% in 2002.
Referring to the recently published 2001-02 Municipal Waste Survey of English local authorities, Mr Enright said that while a lot of councils believed they would be in the range of 15 to 20% for household waste recycling rates, “quite a lot of local authorities are finding themselves in the lower range”. He added that this was “quite a concern” for the Waste Implementation Programme.
Guidance
The Local Authority Support Unit will be working to provide councils with guidance on the procurement of waste services, including contract development tools such as templates for tenders. The unit will also be looking into how to increase the capture rates of recycling schemes as well as assessing civic amenity sites and bulky waste collections to provide best practice information.
Mr Enright warned: “There is a good chance that we are going to miss the obligations of the Landfill Directive by about half a million tonnes. But I do believe a lot of good things are happening out there. We need to review it and find out what is good and bad so we can all learn from it.”
The WIP local authority support will work alongside WIP funding measures such as DEFRA’s 135 million recycling fund. Mr Enright said that part of this money, possibly as much as 45 million, would be going to councils on a performance basis. Councils awarded money from the 135m fund would be obliged to submit information on the effectiveness of their projects on a quarterly basis, he said.
Mr Enright said that although DEFRA’s recycling fund would not continue indefinitely, he believed it would “go on for years”. However, some of the local authorities present at the LARAC meeting expressed frustration at DEFRA’s strategy of “holding a beauty contest for councils every year”, calling for a more stable form of recycling funding.
Complex
Adding to the calls for a new system of local authority recycling funding, LARAC chair Andy Doran said: “Welcome as all this funding is, we need to move on from this 40-year-old system in which recycling is part of a non-specific grant for local authorities, which was set up for dump and dispose. That system is not suitable for the complex nature of sustainable waste management – to do this new kind of waste management, we need a whole new funding approach in the longer term.”
Responding to the calls, Mr Enright said that it was up to councils to realise that statutory recycling targets on councils are “corporate targets”. He explained that councils had to understand that the targets were for the whole council to reach, not just waste management officers, and that penalties for failure would affect councils, not just waste management departments.
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