Cornwall will count the cost of contracting out

Cornwall may be a geographically peripheral region, but it has a world-competitive brand as a richly endowed visitor destination and produces inventive, creative brains and ideas. We have also been innovators in business – Cornish miners pioneered the global mobility of skilled labour – and the former Council’s decision to run waste disposal through a company that made it profitable was a wise one. County Environmental Services (CES), the Council-owned, arms-length company that functioned as Cornwall’s waste disposal service, had really only just begun to show what it was capable of when the decision was taken to contract waste management out to SITA.

It is this interruption of the journey towards achieving CES’s potential that has so hurt people in Cornwall and led to the fierce resistance to the alternative path the Council has since pursued. Battles such as that fought by the community of St Dennis against the Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre (CERC) do not find their inspiration simply in injustice or logic, but rather in a deep-seated sense that something basic is very wrong, instinctively shared between many people, some actively engaged, some passive supporters, many uninformed but who would, if they knew, rally to the cause. The harder SITA and the Council push for the huge PFI incinerator, the more implacable I believe resistance will be.

From my position as an independent member of Cornwall Council, I’ve seen these developments at first hand. In fact, I was Environment Portfolio Holder (PH) for Cornwall County Council, and subsequently Corporate Resources PH – this meant that for a period of five years, I was first ‘client’ and then ‘shareholder’ of the company. Reading Mike Brown’s recent article about how the integrated waste contract with SITA came about and where it leaves Cornwall now, three things suggested themselves to me:

1. It was daft for Cornwall to surrender ownership of the means of disposing of its waste. Waste is a fundamental aspect of public health management and if, for any reason, the contract with SITA fails in Cornwall, then we have no back-up plan; the cost of contingency would be crippling to the Cornish community, especially as we are faced with a soaring bill for adult care – another ‘demand-led’ budget line. With waste, CES had brought expenditure under control and was showing results. The SITA contract has so far only led to contention and cost, with little to show for it.
2. We have consistently failed to characterise the whole of Cornwall’s waste arisings, which has led us to look at the wrong technology. Anaerobic digestion (AD) would effectively dispose of the county’s food waste and generate locally consumable heat and power; but equally importantly in a rural economy it would also treat slurry – perhaps the single most expensive and unproductive aspect of modern livestock farming. The region is now identifying farming, food processing and tourism as its triumvirate of economic pillars upon which economic development will be founded (as highlighted in the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership Economic Development Strategy 2012). Not having the means to adequately and constructively utilise farm waste is building in costs, when the object, if one is pursuing productivity as the key to growth, should be to force cost down and out of business. The CERC does nothing to help with this critical waste problem.
3. The role of two prejudices in pushing us away from recycling and towards incineration in the early 2000s should not be underestimated. One was a misplaced middle-class sentiment about waste – I well remember one of my fellow PH’s shrilling – ‘We can’t possibly have Cornish people picking through domestic waste!’ This attitude was fatal to CES’s effective and achievable scheme (a rarity in a world bedevilled by theories and marketing) to reduce exposure to the new and swingeing landfill taxes.  Equally important was the embarrassing in-built prejudice amongst public sector officers that led them to overstate private sector leadership, intelligence, ability and trustworthiness, and which left them predisposed to see SITA as the answer. I am not a supporter of the outsourcing of public services.

Mike was right also to remember Pam Lyne in his article. Her bravery, intelligence and political guile almost won the day in the fight against the SITA contract. Invoke her and you invoke the Cornish: she had instincts which read deeply into that consciousness, she worked Cornish land and made common cause with Cornish farmers – world-class managers and entrepreneurs denied capital by fools who thought they knew best, and denied succession by an education system that failed to understand the county, its culture or the lives of farmers’ children.

Cornwall is tied into SITA for thirty years, sufficient time for a generation to forget the instincts of its forebears, to become sentimental about a business that is one line on a complex balance sheet somewhere richly anonymous. What happened when CES was corporately slaughtered changed the face of resilient Cornwall forever, for the worse, and for reasons that do not bear even facile scrutiny. The real cost – of reforming a facilitator of waste disposal, owned by the community for the community – will be faced by a resentful generation beyond ours, and possibly beyond that of our children. But it will be faced, and the costs will be enormous, far in excess of the hundreds of millions being dashed against the ideological rocks of outsourcing – and, behind their dark clouds the hearty chuckle of Pam Lyne will resound.

I believe that it will not be long before tax-payers start to ask why they no longer receive 100% value for their tax-pound, but only 60-80%, with the remainder creamed off in profit. The public sector is not a cake ripe for cutting – it is a collection of services designed to provide a sophisticated social and environmental infrastructure upon which people can rely to flourish, explore their potential and to enjoy healthy, prosperous and responsible lives. It is bound to be the rich who lead the challenge to the profiteering and loss of value of the tax pound that outsourcing and PFI represent – they are the ones who benefit least from the state and who worry most about their money. But while the example of CES shows how effective the public sector can be, I fear that this story, and the ill judged and costly CERC project, will play into the hands of those whose solution would be to dismantle the public sector still further.