Formed in 1986, the MRWA manages waste and recycling on behalf of five Merseyside local authorities and via a separate partnership for Halton council.
The waste disposal authority published accounts covering the period between April 2020 and March 2021 on 30 July.
During 2020/21, the MRWA spent a total of £76.9 million. The main contributors to this were the £45.6 million the waste disposal authority spent on its ‘resource recovery contract’ with Merseyside Energy Recovery Limited (MERL) and the £22.8 million it spent on its waste management contract with Veolia.
The MRWA’s income for the year was £86 million. The authority’s income comes largely from a statutory levy on its constituent district councils, alongside a charge to Halton council for waste disposal services.
In 2020/21, the authority also received additional funding of £3.1 million to manage the additional costs arising from the Covid-19 pandemic.
In a statement accompanying its accounts, the MRWA said Covid-19 had resulted in “cost and operational impacts which continue in the current year”.
The impacts included the closure of the region’s household waste recycling centres and an increase to residual and recyclable waste volumes.
Levy
Merseyside taxpayers fund the MRWA through the statutory levy. For 2020/21, the waste disposal authority’s levy on Merseyside councils increased by 3.4% so it could “continue to work towards matching resources with expenditure”.
For 2021/22, the district councils asked that any increase to the levy, eventually agreed at 0.11%, should be kept to a minimum.
This “almost zero increase” was enabled by the councils asking the authority to accept some of the additional one-off Covid-19 funding they had received from the government, the MRWA said. The funding went towards offsetting the authority’s own one-off Covid-19 costs.
Merseyside
Serving more than 1.5 million people in the Liverpool city region, the MRWA had a recycling rate of 37.2% in the 2019/20 financial year, the latest available data.
The waste disposal authority has contracts with several companies for the collection and treatment of waste. In 2009, the MRWA awarded Veolia a 20-year waste management and recycling contract worth £640 million (see letsrecycle.com story).
In 2014, the MRWA awarded a 30-year residual waste treatment contract worth £1.8 billion to a consortium called MERL, which was led by Suez UK (see letsrecycle.com story). Under the contract, residual waste is taken by rail from Knowsley to a Suez energy from waste plant in Redcar, where it is used to create electricity and steam.
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