In a strongly-worded report on hazardous waste, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs committee said the Environment Agency was under-resourced. It also said it was “profoundly concerned” that the Waste Acceptance Criteria have still not been agreed.
It added that it was “disturbed” at the government's inadequate relationship with industry and proposed that a national hazardous waste forum be formed.
The committee, which recommended “as a matter of urgency” that Environment Agency funding be reviewed, focused on the failure of the Waste Acceptance Criteria to be finalised before the Landfill Directive came into force on 16 July 2002. The criteria were due to be completed on 23 July – a week after the deadline for submission of landfill conditioning plans – but this date has now been put back until October.
“This delay should not have occurred. The criteria are crucial to landfill site operators' decisions about what category of site they wish to operate,” the report said.
Uncertainty
The dominant theme in the evidence submitted to the enquiry was of uncertainty, with evidence from Cleanaway cited. The company told the committee: “We do not know what criteria waste will have to meet to be allowed into landfill, we do not know what level of treatment will be required and we do not even know the exact dates when parts of the Directive will come into effect.”
The government needs to review how environmental legislation is arrived at in the European Commission and in future, new European legislation should not be agreed until the practical implications of implementation are well-understood, the committee said.
And if European legislation is agreed to too soon, the government should lobby for the implementation date to be tied to the date the criteria are finalised, not the date on which a directive is agreed, it said.
The report also recommended that government and industry should work as partners to manage hazardous waste in the future. “It seems clear to us that if private industries are to provide the solutions to waste management problems, they should be involved in the development of any strategy to achieve such solutions,” it said.
And it proposed a national hazardous waste forum between government, waste producers, the waste management industry, regulators and local government.
Welcomed
Waste management trade association the ESA welcomed the committee's conclusions. “ESA's members are willing to invest up to 1 billion a year and the Committee has correctly identified the regulatory uncertainty undermining this investment programme,” chief executive Dirk Hazell said.
But Mr Hazell insisted the UK needs a clear national strategy to manage hazardous waste.
Responding to industry evidence that called for a hazardous waste plan, the committee had said that it did not believe there was a need for a formal strategic plan, but that the government should outline its targets for hazardous waste management in a single document.
The report is available via the committee's homepage at:
www.parliament.uk/commons/selcom/efrahome.htm
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