(10 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
The story I have to put to the Minister this afternoon is one of gross disregard for the environment and for my constituents, inadequate regulation by the Environment Agency, and deplorable political pressure on the authorities not to act to protect my constituents. In raising this issue, I want to thank my hon. Friend the Minister and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister for the personal interest they have taken in it since I raised it with them.
A fire of carpet waste has burned for almost six months on the site of an old brickworks at Thrunton in my constituency. The site is alongside the busy A697, and adjoining or close to it are 26 houses, some of them built for the brickworks’ staff. Some time after it closed in 2010, the owner, Mr Blythe, who has done everything he could to help deal with the situation, made it available to Blackwater (North East) Ltd for waste carpet storage, relying on the company to obtain and comply with the necessary approvals.
During the afternoon of 3 September 2013, the waste carpet at Thrunton caught fire. Fire crews rushed to the scene and started trying to tackle the fire. There was an enormous amount of smoke from the fire, completely blocking the adjacent A697. Traffic was diverted. The stench could be smelled up to 15 miles away, beyond Alnwick and Rothbury. Local residents shut their windows and doors and were told to stay inside. The fire quickly spread to bales of carpet both inside and outside the buildings where they were stored. Pouring water on the fire was cooling the outer surface of the burning carpet, but then a hard crust was forming and the water was running off, leaving the fire alight inside the bales. The building that housed some of the bales, part of the former brickworks, partly collapsed. Due to the volume of water and the lie of the land, the water running off from the fire crews’ efforts was also threatening the neighbouring watercourses and fishing lake.
The bales of carpet had been stored outside the area where they were permitted to be kept, which meant that instead of being on a hard concrete area, they were on porous ground that could soak up the contaminated run-off water. That ground covers the natural aquifer where water collects and feeds the local spring, which supplies water to the properties at Thrunton. Such was the danger to this supply that the control team decided that the fire could not be put out and would have to be managed while it burned itself out. The fire was finally judged to be out in the second week of February 2014.
There have been regular inspections of the site by officers from Northumberland’s fire and rescue service, the Environment Agency, the environmental health department, and Public Health England, as well as my own staff. A misting system was installed to damp down the fire, but that was problematic, and there had been several attempts to get it in place before November.
The landowner, Mr Blythe, has been proactively managing the fire himself throughout. Wearing breathing apparatus and using a digger, he has, with the agreement of the fire service, removed the burnt material from the fire that is outside the building and dampened it in the pools of water which had run off from the fire. Paying a contractor to do this work would have cost tens of thousands of pounds. Without Mr Blythe’s efforts, it is thought that the fire could have burned for two years longer. The operating company did nothing. The fire inside the building continues to burn. A multi-agency incident control team was set up involving Northumberland’s environmental health department, the fire service, the Environment Agency, and Public Health England.
Residents naturally wanted to know what substances they were being exposed to, and what the short, medium and long-term effects could be. The assurances they were given were hard to accept when they were having to keep their windows and doors shut at all times, turn off ventilation systems, and make alternative arrangements for drying their washing. We repeatedly asked for smoke testing but did not get it until January, nearly five months after the fire broke out. This lengthy battle over different issues has added unnecessarily to the stress and worry for my constituents.
The burnt material remains on site, and there is a continuing risk of contamination of local watercourses. One of the ongoing issues throughout this sorry saga has been who takes responsibility for removing the burnt material. Throughout the process, residents have been assured that it would be removed. At one point the Environment Agency proposed that the cost of waste removal could be shared with the county council, but the county council argued that responsibility for issuing the permits and for monitoring and enforcing them was held by the Environment Agency and so it should act to deal with the consequences.
The landlord has been left with about 3,000 tonnes of burnt material. To clear the site would cost at least £200,000. It will cost £500,000 if the waste analysis code requires it to be treated as hazardous, which is not yet clear.
The Environment Agency has resisted all calls for it to take action to clear the site and charge Blackwater, the operator, with the cost. It argues that the site operator should be given the opportunity to rectify the situation. I fear there is little hope of that happening. What confidence can we have that Blackwater will do anything? It has done nothing at all to deal with the fire or the pollution it has caused.
I turn now to the Environment Agency’s lack of enforcement of permit conditions. Blackwater’s business model involves taking waste carpet from a number of sources to be shredded and baled and then reused to surface equestrian arenas. It had a further plan, which never got anywhere, to make briquettes from a blend of carpet and wood bound with paraffin wax for biomass power stations.
On 21 June 2011, Blackwater was awarded a permit to operate as a
“Household, commercial and industrial waste transfer station with treatment”.
The first breaches of the permit were identified when the Environment Agency inspected the site in July 2011. It gave advice and guidance. There were subsequent breaches in September and December 2011 and March 2012. In fact, the first time there was an inspection that did not record any breaches was on 6 July 2012—but actually there was a breach. Material previously stored outside had been moved to storage bays, but those bays had been put up on part of the site that was outside the area covered by the permit—yet the agency accepted that.
From February 2013, the situation at the site deteriorated quickly, and the landlord became increasingly concerned about the breaches. In early February 2013, when he complained to the Environment Agency, it said that the site would be inspected in the next few weeks and that
“the landlord’s patience would be appreciated”.
At a site visit in March 2013, officials saw the waste being stored outside the shed in excess of the permitted tonnage by a large amount. On 20 March, they asked the operator for an action plan with a deadline of 3 April 2013 to deal with the issue. On 17 April, they agreed a new deadline. Blackwater then advised the Environment Agency that it would be relocating, but it did not. An action plan was received on 23 May, more than seven weeks after the original deadline. There is no approved management system in place for the site.
Too often it seems that the Environment Agency has accepted at face value information given to it by Blackwater. Deadlines passed and seem simply to have been revised. Storage bays were in place, but they were not within the area covered by the permit. The business was going to move, but it did not. Breaches of permit conditions were also identified at the business’s other site at Milfield, near Wooler in my constituency.
This company has been paid about £60 a tonne to take waste carpet, which has been stockpiled in amounts far greater than allowed and outside the areas for which the permit was given. There was only a very limited end-of-waste agreement. Complaints were made to the Environment Agency by Mr Blythe, his solicitors and neighbouring residents about Blackwater’s operations. The Environment Agency has now told me that it is pursuing enforcement action against Blackwater, but what was it doing before? Was it under any pressure to go easy on Blackwater?
It took a parliamentary question to establish that only one representation called on the Environment Agency not to take enforcement action, and it took a freedom of information request to get sight of the e-mail and careful study of the documents to establish who had sent it, because names are redacted. The e-mail reads:
“Hi Owen…See below from the excellent business which I sent you the EA papers for after your trip to Northumberland.
As you can see below the EA are trying to shut the business down even though its their non-processing of the licences which is the cause.
Time is of the essence now for financial reasons—please can you update me on any progress with EA? I am in London on tuesday and wednesday morning next week if we needed to meet.
Your urgent assistance in this is much appreciated.”
The Secretary of State did not reply until 5 August. His letter was headed by hand, “Dear Anne-Marie”, which somebody forgot to redact, which made it quite clear that the Conservative prospective candidate for the Berwick constituency had called on the Environment Agency to go easy on the company, which she thought was “excellent”, but was engaged in a serial failure to comply with environmental requirements. In fact, the Secretary of State detailed some of the failures in his letter, and urged that the company should work closely with the Environment Agency. It was an appalling failure of judgment for a political candidate to attempt to put pressure on the Environment Agency to go easy on a company flouting permit conditions, which are there to protect my constituents. I hope that the Minister will confirm that the Department did nothing as a result of that representation to pressure the Environment Agency not to carry out its enforcement responsibilities.
The fact remains that the Environment Agency was, through its lack of enforcement, allowing the company to store combustible waste in ways which were bound to make a fire much more serious. I have asked the Environment Agency to clear the site and then claim against Blackwater’s public liability insurance, but it is not willing to attempt that course. Apparently, the Environment Agency would be happy to advise Mr Blythe on how best he could clear the site, but that would mean Mr Blythe having to find the funds to do so—up to £500,000—and then making a claim against Blackwater’s insurance, which might take years to settle.
If Blackwater fails to clear the site, its permit may well be revoked, but in that case, the problem would become one of contaminated land. The liability for restoring the land—in other words, for removing the burnt waste—might fall on Mr Blythe, as the landowner, and enforcement action could be taken against him for failing to deal with the contamination, despite all his work to try to deal with it. Is that fair? Of course it is not. I therefore ask the Minister to discuss that aspect of the problem with the Environment Agency.
Blackwater has apparently shown its bank statements to the Environment Agency, and has said that the business has no money to fund a clean-up operation. The company should have received well over £600,000 for taking carpet for recycling, yet no funds were set aside for dealing with the aftermath of potential disasters. Should there not be a bond system, such as existed until 2003, so that money is available for emergency clean-ups, given the increasing number of waste fires around the country? All the Environment Agency now does is to check the financial competence of the operator, a system which completely failed in this case. If something is not done, many more people will suffer as my constituents have done. I ask the Minister to see what he can do to get a happier outcome from this sorry story.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)
Following our Welsh colleagues’ deliberations to mark St David’s day, Madam Deputy Speaker, I wish you and the House gool Peran lowen—a happy St Piran’s day—for yesterday, on behalf of Cornish colleagues.
I was horrified to hear the story that my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) has shared with us. He has raised it several times in this place and elsewhere, and he is absolutely right to do so. The issues are very serious, and his points about the regulation of the Blackwater (North East) Ltd waste site are crucial ones for us to bear in mind as we consider the regulatory framework across the country.
I recognise how diligently my right hon. Friend has represented the interests of his constituents, many of whom have endured significant disruption to their lives and have had to contend with fears about the health effects of the fumes from the fire. I also recognise and commend the work of the site’s landowners, Mr and Mrs Blythe, in helping to extinguish the fire and to prevent pollution from the extinguished waste, as my right hon. Friend set out.
I welcome reports that the firefighting strategy and actions taken to control the run-off of firewater have so far proved effective and have prevented the contamination of both surface water and groundwater. I understand that Public Health England has advised that it does not expect there to be any long-term health effects from the fire.
My right hon. Friend rightly wants to know when his constituents will be rid of the waste operation, and when the stored waste will be removed. The site must now be returned to a condition that does not pose a continuing risk to the local community and the environment. The primary legal responsibility for that sits firmly with Blackwater, as the holder of the environmental permit. The site operator must meet his responsibility to clear the site and make it safe. As my right hon. Friend said, the landowners, Mr and Mrs Blythe, are calling for the Environment Agency to remove the residual waste from the site. The full cost of removing and disposing of the waste is estimated to be in the region of £635,000. Clearly, the removal of the stored waste must be a priority for all concerned.
I understand that there were early signs that the operator of the site was co-operating with the Environment Agency to address the breaches of his permit. However, as my right hon. Friend will be aware, the agency found it necessary to serve an enforcement notice on Blackwater on 10 January 2014. The notice required the company to comply with its environmental permit by removing all the extinguished waste by 24 February.
The site operator has utterly failed to comply with the notice. As a result, the Environment Agency is gathering evidence and has called the operator to a formal interview under caution to answer allegations of non-compliance, which could lead to prosecution or other enforcement action, including a court order to clear the site. If the operator is prosecuted, he should face the full consequences of his failings.
The seriousness of environmental offences and their environmental and economic impact has been recognised and embodied in the Sentencing Council’s definitive guideline on environmental offences, which was published last week. In following the guideline, it is hoped that courts will reflect the true cost of breaches of environmental legislation when sentencing offenders and that that will act as a strong deterrent.
As my right hon. Friend has indicated, the Environment Agency has discretionary powers that enable it to take action and recover costs.
Sir Alan Beith
I took part in the framing of the sentencing guidelines and hope that they will provide strong guidance if the matter comes to court. The Minister has referred to the recent decision to take enforcement action. Will he deal later in his remarks with the extraordinarily long period of inaction between 2011 and 2013?
Dan Rogerson
I assure my right hon. Friend that I will talk about the discussions that I have had with the Environment Agency on earlier intervention in sites that may cause a problem or that are causing alarm.
In the first instance, the Environment Agency is encouraging the operator and the landowner to liaise with their respective insurers so that the cost of clearing and disposing of the waste does not add to the significant costs that have been incurred by the public purse in responding to the incident and in the subsequent pollution monitoring. Given the potential cost that I have set out, we must do everything that we can to avoid it being borne by the public purse. We face many challenges and the Environment Agency is doing a great deal of work across a range of issues, not least as a result of the recent extreme weather events. We must not leap up to incur these costs because they would have an impact on the budget of the Environment Agency or the local authority that intervened.
More generally, I hope that it will reassure my right hon. Friend to hear that I have been working with the Environment Agency and others to consider how we might prevent problems like those at Thrunton from arising, so that we do not have to take lengthy and costly remedial action. I met the chairman of the Environment Agency, Lord Smith of Finsbury, and its chief executive, Dr Paul Leinster, late last year to discuss these matters, following my appointment as Minister in October. I will do so again shortly.
The agency is under a duty to ensure that site operators are in a position to meet the obligations under their permits. I have challenged the agency to come to me with proposals on this issue. I am pleased to say that it is exploring, with representatives of the waste management industry, how operators can ensure that they are in a position to fund their obligations, including any potential clear-up and reducing the risk of the abandonment of waste and waste fires.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency are working with the waste industry and the fire and rescue service to identify the root cause of fire incidents. We will assess the lessons that can be learned and the longer-term interventions that may be needed. The Environment Agency is reviewing what it can do to reduce the risk of fires, reduce the drivers of non-compliant behaviour and tackle the problem swiftly.
My right hon. Friend rightly focused on the agency’s approach to the enforcement of the permit conditions at the site. The Environment Agency has a statutory duty to carry out appropriate periodic inspections of regulated facilities to check their compliance with the terms and conditions of the environmental permits that it grants.
The agency has my full backing to take tough and timely enforcement action against those who repeatedly flout the law, undermine the legitimate waste management industry, and cause suffering to local communities. As part of the lessons to be learned from the handling of this case, I will ask the agency to consider whether its enforcement action could have been swifter.
I acknowledge that there have been several recent fires at regulated waste sites, with impacts on local communities that are similar to this case. Some 97% of waste management operators are good performers, so the emphasis must be on how best to intervene early to deal with the non-compliance of the poorest performers in a way that prevents harm to human health and damage to the environment.
The impact of poor performance and waste fires is one topic in the report, “Waste Crime: Tackling Britain’s Dirty Secret”, which was published on Tuesday this week by the Environmental Services Association Education Trust. I made it clear at the launch of that report that the Government want legitimate waste businesses to prosper and grow. Effective compliance and enforcement are needed to ensure that the market operates as we want, and that serious environmental damage is avoided. My right hon. Friend can be assured that I will continue to monitor the outcome of the incident, and work with the agency to ensure that lessons are learned. I will write to inform him of the actions to be taken as a result.
Sir Alan Beith
I would like to be sure of two things from the Minister. First, does he believe that an atmosphere was created in which the agency did not feel that it could or should use its powers, and that that was perhaps contributed to by inappropriate political pressures such as those I have described? Secondly, is he prepared to talk further with the Environment Agency about how we can avoid a situation in which a landowner who has done so much to deal with the problem is landed with the quite impossible total cost of the clear up?
Dan Rogerson
I am happy to make such an undertaking on my right hon. Friend’s latter point, and in my discussions on the more general points I will look at the specifics of this case and at how Mr Blythe might be affected and what can be done, given the helpful attitude he has shown and the effort he has put into tackling the incident.
On the point about interference, I have made it clear that we expect the agency to intervene early. It is not my understanding that anything resulted from any contact there may have been with the Department on issues such as this, and in discussions with the agency I have made it clear that I expect it to tackle such problems early. I hope my right hon. Friend will feel that that is the correct way to deal with this and that that is the attitude we should be showing when tackling operators who are not managing resources effectively or moving towards the circular economy we want to see, but who are profiting at the expense of the local environment and local communities.
Question put and agreed to.