Waste- a challenge requiring joined- up action
The strategy set out new and more ambitious targets for waste prevention, recycling and diversion of waste from landfill, promoted a strengthened focus on business waste and initiated new policy instruments for achieving this. A key objective of the waste strategy is to help combat dangerous climate change, where waste policies have a significant contribution to make. This is both to reduce embedded carbon in products through waste prevention, re use and recycling, and to reduce methane emissions from landfill. We have also set waste firmly in the context of a wider need to protect our resources.
Our direction also pointed to the need for more emphasis on waste reduction - at the top of the waste hierarchy - as having the best environmental benefits, and the greatest scope for cost savings, of the available kinds of action on waste. We put a strong focus on the need for joint action and shared responsibilities to help deliver these aims: Between central and local government, between the different national delivery bodies such as WRAP and the Environment Agency; between local government and business; and between the different functions and tiers of local government.
Since we published our strategy, we have seen a continuing reduction in waste growth, as well as a sustained fall in waste sent to landfill and rise in household recycling - confirmed in the latest statistics for the financial year 2007-08. A significant amount of new waste treatment infrastructure has been committed. And we have seen a large number of new initiatives from business, including new commitments on retail packaging, construction waste, food waste and waste treatment. These have been strongly encouraged by central government and incentivised by a combination of fiscal and regulatory measures.
We were very pleased to see waste featuring strongly in local area agreements, the more so since under the new framework for local government there is a considerable amount of discretion to local government over the selection of LAA targets across the range of local government activity. Our increased emphasis on waste prevention means that in looking at local authority performance on waste, we are paying at least as much attention to the comparative performance of different local areas on waste reduction as on recycling and composting. Comparative performance can look very different, depending on the indicator chosen.
It is also gratifying that joint working between neighbouring local authorities, aimed at gaining economies of scale in waste treatment, or at securing better integration between waste collection and disposal, is now becoming ever more closely established. Close working on waste between different parts of local government is also becoming more firmly established: for example between waste and economic development functions, in order to integrate business waste recycling with local economic benefits; and between waste and land use planning functions, in order to promote more strategic consideration of how waste treatment should feature in local spatial plans.
Moving forward on waste poses a number of broader challenges. Local authorities have , like central government, had to undertake an almost constant process of reprioritisation to ensure that spending matches resources. Since higher levels of recycling require behavioural changes change among both households and businesses, local government has had to work hard to ensure that it is focusing sufficiently on how to bring about the necessary behaviour change while still retaining public confidence. Addressing the almost constant media attention given to waste collection issues in the national and local press - sometimes well informed, but very often not, with the truth often distorted - has been a particular challenge for both central and local government.
We now have a major further challenge through the more difficult macro-economic and financial climate that has become evident through the autumn. The speed and size of events has made it particularly difficult to assess their full impacts, for either the short or longer term. It is likely, however, that the implications for waste will be very mixed: changes in commodity prices can significantly affect the relative economics of waste treatment; the problems of the financial sector affect the ability to finance waste treatment infrastructure; and there are increased challenges for local authorities and businesses in how to prioritise spend on waste compared with other spending objectives.
A final challenge is to work with the changing public receptiveness among residents and local businesses for communications about waste as economic considerations start to dominate further - though this is more likely to require some variation in the kinds of message needed - for example, to bring out that reducing waste can save money - rather than simply jettisoning the messages.
In all this, it is vital to retain, and indeed strengthen, trust and close working relationships between central and local government. This has worked particularly well in recent years, both in the formulation of our waste strategy and in its early implementation. I very much hope that this approach of joint working and a shared sense of aims and purpose continues.
