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Parliamentary Questions

Yazan: Lucy | 26 October 2009 | 1 Comment
Categories: Goings On

It’s Defra’s turn for Oral Parliamentary Questions this week.  Written questions can, and do, arrive in Departments at any time, but oral questions come round on a rota.  The minister answers the questions in person in the House and MPs can then ask additional questions.  One of the more ‘entertaining’ aspects of this job is [...]

Modernising Landfill Tax Legislation

Yazan: Lucy | 28 April 2009 | 1 Comment
Categories: Legislation

That’s the pithy title of a new consultation from Her Majesty’s Treasury which is lurking on their Budget 2009 pages.
The Landfill Tax was introduced in 1996 and has become the major driver behind most municipal waste reduction and recycling efforts.  There a currently two rates of Landfill Tax: the standard rate applies to ’active’ wastes – basically stuff that [...]

Ermine and vermin

Yazan: Lucy | 26 March 2009 | 5 Comments
Categories: General Witterings

On Tuesday, I had my first experience of the House of Lords.  Yes, after 8 and half years in the Civil Service I finally failed to drop oral Parliamentary Questions onto a London-based colleague and had to attend myself.
Oral PQs are an odd sort of thing really.   A member asks a question, which the Minister [...]

Relaxing (sort of)

Yazan: Lucy | 21 January 2009 | 4 Comments
Categories: General Witterings, Recycling, Things I Learned Today

I’m on holiday – hooray and hoorah – and yet finding that issues of waste won’t quite let me go.  We’re staying on the Langdale Estate, which has excellent recycling facilities, despite being almost in the middle of nowhere.  Of course, the waste collection facilities here benefit from the economies of scale of a largish [...]

More on PFI for waste management infrastructure

Yazan: Lucy | 12 January 2009 | No Comments
Categories: infrastructure

With grateful thanks to a colleague who shall remain anonymous because I forgot to ask him if he minded being outed as a Civil Servant…

The sizing of each waste management facility is considered very carefully as part of the PFI appraisal process and is linked specifically to Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) deriving from an [...]

Recycling and National Indicators

Yazan: Lucy | 27 October 2008 | 3 Comments
Categories: Recycling

This started out as a reply to a comment from Mark, but got a bit long so I decided to cheat and use it as todays post!
“well at least you get some plastic recycling, as we get none at kerbside, and just a couple of banks for whole county at supermarkets.
Lucy, defra do also have [...]