Defra publishes long-awaited draft Waste Management Plan for England

However, environmental law expert Fiona Ross of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that the long-awaited Waste Management Plan was "no more than a round-up of existing waste management policies" and would be likely to "continue to be criticised by many in the industry for lacking ambition".

"Defra has been criticised by many in the industry for some time for its failure to publish a Waste Management Plan for England, which the revised Waste Framework Directive set a deadline of 2010 for producing," she said.

"The revised Waste Framework Directive requires member states to take various measures to promote high quality recycling, encourage separate collection and treatment of biowaste, encourage reuse of materials and meet targets for recycling and recovering household waste and construction and demolition waste. Scotland was quick off the blocks, publishing its Zero Waste Plan in 2010, but England has to a degree lagged behind both in terms of timescale and the substance of its policies," she said.  

Under the WFD, a national waste management plan must "set out an analysis of the current waste management situation ... as well as the measures to be taken to improve environmentally sound preparing for reuse, recycling, recovery and disposal of waste". It should also include an "evaluation" of how the measures contained in the plan will "support the implementation of the objectives and provisions" of the WFD, the WFD said. 

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said that its plan did not "introduce new waste management measures". "The purpose of this consultation, therefore, is to seek views on whether the Plan - when combined with the updated waste planning policy - will fulfil the obligations of ... the revised Waste Framework Directive as far as England is concerned," it said.

"We estimate that – because there are no new policies in the plan – there are no costs and benefits arising from the Plan itself (though there are of course costs and benefits associated with the policies referred to in the Plan)," Defra said.

The consultation is open until 9 August. Once the plan is finalised, all planning authorities in England must refer to both it and Planning Policy Statement 10 (PPS 10) Planning for Sustainable Waste Management when deciding waste planning applications under the Town and Country Planning Act. Local waste authorities must also "have regard" to the national plan when producing their local waste plans.

Waste is governed at an EU level by the WFD, adopted in 2008. The Waste (England and Wales) Regulations, which implemented the WFD in England and Wales, came into force on 29 March 2011. Amendments to the English regulations were made last year in response to a judicial review challenge and the EU requirements in relation to the separation of different types of waste.

Ross said that the Scottish Government was already in the process of implementing measures to ban the mixing, landfilling or incineration of separately collected wastes, and would adopt separate collection of "key recyclables" from households from 2014, alongside a range of other measures. In contrast, Defra had spent much of the past year "fighting for the right to co-mingle separately collected recyclables, but will implement separate collection from 2015 where necessary to facilitate or improve recovery and where practicable", she said.

"Defra has consulted on a draft Materials Recovery Facility Code of Practice, which is intended to drive the quality of recyclates, and is expected to publish a response this summer," she said. "However, it has left to local authorities the decision as to whether to implement separate biowaste collections, and does not intend to impose obligations on food waste producers to segregate their biowaste, instead opting for a voluntary agreement with the Hospitality and Food Services sector."

"Meanwhile, it has just finished consulting on removing the requirement for Site Waste Management Plans for construction projects worth over £300,000 in England, despite the target in the revised Waste Framework Directive for at least 70% by weight of construction and demolition waste to be subjected to material recovery," she said.