Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Butler): I welcome DAERA officials to brief the Committee and answer questions. We have Karl Beattie, assistant director of environmental resources, and Laurence McCann, extended producer responsibility 1 team. Is that correct?

Mr Laurence McCann (Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs): Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr Butler): OK. I invite you to brief the Committee.

Mr Karl Beattie (Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs): Thank you, Chair, for your welcome and for the opportunity to brief the Committee today on the SL1 for the Waste (Materials Facilities) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2025.

I will shortly provide members with an overview of the regulations. With your permission, Chair, I apologise for the unfortunate procedural error that brings us here today. As you are aware, the Waste (Materials Facilities) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2025 were laid at the Assembly on 6 February without the Committee having had the opportunity to consider the relevant SL1 as per the normal procedure. The error is regrettable and a matter of some embarrassment to the Department, but it was just that: an error. I assure Members that there was no intention to deny the Committee the opportunity to properly consider and scrutinise the legislation. In essence, it was a simple misunderstanding. The information now contained in the SL1 was provided to the Committee on 23 January but was not correctly presented by officials as an SL1. An incorrect assumption was made that, having noted the briefing, the Committee was content, and the laying of the regulations proceeded on the basis of that misunderstanding. It is something of a cliché, but we will learn from the mistake, and I certainly do not expect to be in the same position again.

With your permission, Chair, I will move to our presentation.

The Chairperson (Mr Butler): Thank you very much.

Mr Beattie: There are currently no statutory requirements for materials facilities (MFs) to sample waste material in Northern Ireland. Sampling may be undertaken at some facilities, such as those handling waste from other jurisdictions, but there is no legislative requirement for it in Northern Ireland. There has been sampling and reporting legislation in place in Scotland since 2015 and in England and Wales since 2016. In 2023, England and Wales updated the sampling and reporting legislation to consider extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging. Scotland followed with amending legislation in 2024. New legislation is required in Northern Ireland to require sampling and reporting, so that parity can be achieved across the UK and ensure that adequate information will be available for extended producer responsibility for packaging.

An objective of EPR for packaging is to ensure packaging producers pay the cost of managing the packaging that they place on the market. To support the delivery of the packaging EPR, enhanced granular data on the composition and quality of packaging waste collected, bulked and sorted by materials facilities needs to be obtained in Northern Ireland. The materials facilities sampling and reporting requirements are detailed in 'The Code of Practice on Sampling and Reporting at Materials Facilities', which is published on the Department's website. All materials facilities will be required to comply with the regulations from 1 April 2025.

Two consultations have been completed on materials facilities sampling in Northern Ireland: one in 2021 and the second in 2024. The 2021 consultation was a UK-wide consultation on EPR for packaging, and it ran for 10 weeks from 24 March to 4 June. The consultation sought views on specific policy proposals for the introduction of EPR for packaging. It was part of a joint consultation by the UK Government, the Welsh Government, the Scottish Government and DAERA. The consultation received 1,241 responses from a wide range of stakeholders, and a summary of the responses and the Government's response to that consultation was published in March 2022.

One of the consultation questions asked:

As regards the 2024 consultation, DAERA developed a code of practice on sampling and reporting at materials facilities in full collaboration with the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA), the Departmental Solicitor's Office (DSO), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Welsh and Scottish Government colleagues. The consultation launched on 16 September and invited feedback from stakeholders on areas such as the draft legislation, the draft code and the new proposed charges to materials facilities.

The consultation period closed on 12 November 2024, and 10 responses were received. The main issues raised fell into 11 themes: for example, which facilities were in scope, potential increased costs, definitions and technology. Those issues were addressed in the consultation response that was shared with the Committee on 23 January, and amendments to the code include the addition of a number of summary boxes to address requests for clarification and the insertion of a table that provides in-scope MFs with a quick reference guide to the requirements. The "Facilities not in scope" section has been made clearer, and the definition section has been updated.

The regulations amend the Waste Management Licensing Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2003 and the Pollution Prevention and Control (Industrial Emissions) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2013. They will insert several key definitions to both sets of regulations: for example, "fibre-based composite material", "materials facility", "specified output material" and "waste material". The amendments require the Department to ensure that appropriate conditions are included in waste management licences and pollution prevention and control (PPC) permits that authorise material facilities, so that the code of practice on the sampling and reporting of materials facilities issued by the Department is complied with. To that end, they insert new definitions into both sets of regulations.

Legislation on the code of practice on sampling and reporting at materials facilities will require in-scope materials facilities to sample and report on their waste material. That sampling and reporting will bring Northern Ireland into line with the rest of the UK.

That concludes our presentation. We are happy to take any questions.

The Chairperson (Mr Butler): Thank you very much for that, and I thank you for noting at the start the difficulties that we faced in regard to the late production, which, in this case, was a simple oversight. The Committee is happy to accept that, and I thank you for mentioning it.

I will ask a technical question first. In this instance, do the licences also apply to facilities that collect and store material and recycle it into packaging material or just to those that collect and store it?

Mr Beattie: It applies to any facility that meets the definition of "materials facility". That definition is complicated. Perhaps, Laurence can give a little more explanation of what that entails.

Mr McCann: Of course. We have aligned with England and Wales on the definition of "materials facility". I can certainly tell you, before I read the definition, that it is very technical. It is:

A few exclusions apply. The definition excludes:

That does not really answer your question. The answer is that part of a recycling site can also be an MF.

I have a few examples of what an MF can be that might help. It can be a facility that sorts a single waste stream, such as paper and card; commercial industrial waste facilities that receive waste material to consolidate or sort it into specified output; and facilities that consolidate waste material received from two or more suppliers into bulk outputs. On such a site, other things could happen.

The Chairperson (Mr Butler): It is really important. I really like that one, because I see a lot about repackaging from big industry when it comes to their credentials around carbon reduction. They say, "This product is made from 70%, 80%, 90% or 100% recycled material"; in particular, the soft drink industry is going down the route of doing away with using virgin material as much as possible. They get credit for whatever they claim to be doing. The regulations get down to the nuts and bolts of measuring the efficacy of that, I imagine, at the very start. That is useful for me, to be honest, because I am aware of and have visited facilities, and I see where the regulations fit.

We hear it a lot in the Chamber that we are at least 10 years behind other UK jurisdictions. Apart from Stormont having been down, is there any particular reason why the Department has not progressed the regulations further up the chain?

Mr McCann: I can follow that. There were, unfortunately, competing priorities. We are behind the rest of the UK. We are also behind Ireland, which is also sampling. We are now just trying to align as much as possible on a UK-wide basis.

The Chairperson (Mr Butler): OK. With regard to the policing of it — the operational testing of compliance — which agency has responsibility for that?

Mr McCann: The Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) will be on the sites. One of the reasons why there is a fee involved is that NIEA, as part of its inspections of the sites, will also examine the MF processes. As part of the phasing, the fees will not come in this year. It will be next year, but there will still be analysis of the sites by NIEA.

Mr Beattie: It is also worth mentioning the importance of the initiative for the wider packaging EPR regime, in that it will provide us with a lot of the evidence that we need to determine whether the policy interventions are having the desired effect. Changing those policy interventions on, for example, the modulation of fees on the packaging EPR is to ensure that we achieve what we set out to achieve and minimise packaging and, certainly, packaging that cannot be recycled and so on.

The Chairperson (Mr Butler): That is useful.

Mr McAleer: Briefly, are the material facilities that will be affected up to speed and ready? Do they know what they need to do to comply with the new requirements?

Mr McCann: The code was consulted on in September, and we will publish guidance — flow charts and things — very shortly to help. The initial code of practice that was consulted on has had very minor changes since September. It is now on the website, and it was shared with everyone who responded to the consultation and everyone who, we think, will be affected. So, yes, they are.

Mr McAleer: Great. Thank you.

Miss McIlveen: Thank you for your presentation. It is my interpretation that council recycling centres will be impacted by this.

Mr Beattie: Household recycling centres?

Miss McIlveen: Yes.

Mr Beattie: No. They will not be impacted. For material that is collected through those sites, there is a specific exclusion. If the council was to establish a materials facility that complied with the definition of a materials facility, that facility would certainly be within scope, but traditional household recycling facilities are not within the scope of the scheme.

Mr McCann: We have a de minimis in place for small suppliers so that this will not have an impact on them. I think that it is 75 tons a quarter. That, basically, means that small suppliers will not be sampled. That further reinforces that household waste recycling centres are not included, but, even if they were included, they would not be sampling any less than 75 tons.

Mr Beattie: Again, that gives us parity with the rest of the UK.

Miss McIlveen: Is that scheme not in the rest of the UK or the Republic? Do they not sample every household recycling centre?

Mr McCann: They certainly do not in the rest of the UK. The Republic's system is slightly different from ours in that sampling is linked to their licensing permits, but, to align with the rest of the UK on this data, we do not.

Miss McIlveen: That is OK. That was just for clarity. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Butler): Thank you. That was a really good presentation. I enjoyed it, and it was very interesting.