LAWR

PFI Councils need 'help' not accusations based on old PFI deals Private finance initiative (PFI) waste projects came under scrutiny last year when an influential committee of MPs sharply criticised Defra over its handling of three PFI schemes involving local authorities. Here, Dan Botterill argues why new alterna- tives to PFI should now be considered. he Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said last September that "lax" contracts, agreed by the last Labour Government with four local authori- ties, failed to deliver value. While in real terms this may be the case, it doesn't' tell the full story and is, if any- thing, a needless finger pointing exer- cise that undermines much of the good work that is being done by many of the 468 local councils in the UK. The problem is both an historical one and a cultural one. The contracts in question were set-up in 1999 under a PFI scheme. Alarm bells should already be ringing. They were designed to pro- vide funds for waste incinerators to be built and maintained. The four coun- cils (Surrey, Norfolk, Herefordshire and Worcestershire) have received £213m in grants since 1998 but facilities are either not built or not yet up and run- ning. Value for money? Probably not but referring to the contracts as being "lax" sort of misses the point. The contracts were more ill-conceived than lax. Most of the contracts run for over 20 years and were already out of date ten if not 15 years ago. They stipulated that incinerators be constructed yet how could they foresee changes in consumer attitudes to waste and changes in waste management technology? Clearly pre- dicting the future is difficult, but at the same time, I think many decisions were taken as something of a knee jerk reac- tion to a prominent short term issue. The key issue in 1998 was the need to divert biodegradable municipal waste from landfill due to the Landfill Directive requirements, but there was a considerable lack of infrastructure to do this on a consistent authority by authority level. By the mid 2000's all local authorities were expected to have waste strategies in place for the management of municipal waste. In some circumstances, this was a statu- tory requirement. At this point, I would argue the waste hierarchy was visible, but not particu- larly understood. The scramble was all about how to meet landfill diversion targets and get off the bottom rung of the waste hierarchy. To some extent this is still true today and this needs to change. Although the waste hierar- chy, resource efficiency and the circular economy as concepts are gaining more prominence, progress is slow, especially in the public sector. I remember constantly hearing at the time that landfill capacity was 'running out', but on reflection I'm not sure this is the whole truth. We still hear today that more infrastructure is required, but there are consistent reports that waste management facilities are consistently under capacity, something doesn't add up here. Wouldn't it be great if coun- cils could just ditch the projects and divert the funds to more current more nimble methods of managing waste? Unfortunately there just wasn't enough flexibility in the PFI deals to enable this to happen and culturally, not enough people understood the technology and what their options were for managing waste. A too short-termist view was taken. So shouldn't all these contracts be revisited and renegotiated based on what we know now? Times have changed. Consumer recy- cling rates are approaching 50% now, so those councils that are procuring energy from waste must be scratching their heads a little mustn't they? There will come a point soon when in some authorities, energy from waste will sim- ply not be economically feasible and we will be left with large, redundant " Waste is not a valuable resource. We need to stop using this out-dated mantra. " 12 Local Authority Waste & Recycling January 2015 T

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