Joined up enforcement

Waste transfer stations, or to you and me places where skip companies sort out what they’ve collected commercially, can be very difficult for people who live close to them.

Dust, noise, smells, rodents and general inconvenience can be a problem, particularly if operators are, shall we say, ‘lax’, about how they operate the site. I have constituents who have had problems along the lines I mention for some time. It’s something that has proved very difficult to sort out partly because there are so many different agencies who have the separate powers to deal with different aspects of the site operations.

It is the County which is responsible for the regulation around where waste transfer sites can go and the enforcement of the conditions under which they operate. Then there’s the Environment Agency which agrees and monitors the amount of waste allowed on site and issues around any risk of pollution to the environment. The Health and Safety Executive are responsible for the safe working of the site in relation to employees and visitors, and finally, the local council (Lichfield DC) Environmental Health responds to things like rodents and ‘quality of life’ (as opposed to health) issues.

It reminds me of the complicated structure of organisations which were involved in dealing with the flooding problems earlier this year except that was even worse because they were both governmental and commercial bodies. In waste enforcement, another problem is that, despite best efforts, the different powers that each of the main enforcement agencies have are used in isolation rather than holistically. In other words there may be several different areas of regulations being broken which in isolution may be significant but added together could be an indication of an even more serious problem. Currently, each agency doesn’t really know what the others are doing enforcement wise!

And that’s why I brought the different enforcement agencies together in a meeting room at the Lichfield Garrick to find ways of bridging the gaps. Getting rid of ’silo mentality’ is something which government in general finds an enormous challenge and it’s something I’m passionate about tackling wherever and however I can. That’s what the Staffordshire Connects Partnership, which I chair, does in relation to ICT, information sharing and public services delivery.

So, the meeting at the Garrick was a first shot at getting the different enforcers to work closer and more collaboratively together. It was a good start and there was a genuine willingness to cooperate after everyone started to break down the ‘Chinese walls‘ which almost always seem to be there until someone knocks them down. I firmly believe that ‘difficult’ waste sites will be better enforced on behalf of the public and if my experience is anything to go by it can be done a lot more efficiently and cost effectively by approaching it cross-agency.

Anyway, they went away with pieces of work to do towards this and I made sure we got another meeting in the diary for early January just to keep the pressure on. I do believe this will go somewhere significant.

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