Environment agency chief Lord Chris Smith warns 'cowboys' to watch out

Lord Chris Smith seems an unlikely gunslinger. But in his role as environment Agency chairman, the mild-mannered former Labour MP is threatening to show some true grit. “We’re making it very clear: we will go after the cowboys,” he told The Grocer during a visit to Coca-Cola Enterprises’ (CCE) manufacturing facility in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, last week.

By “cowboys” he means businesses that have flouted rules governing their impact on the planet. Companies like poultry processor Moy Park - fined £12,000 last month for allowing a facility in Lincolnshire to take 17% more water than its allocation despite agency warnings - and Medina dairy, whose carelessness led to milk polluting a river close to one of its sites in Essex. It was hit by magistrates with a £30,ooo fine in July.

That’s not all he has on his plate. Apart from a ministerial reshuffle leaving his staff having to start afresh with new secretary for the environment, food & rural affairs Owen Paterson (Tory) and farming minister David Heath (Lib Dem), the agency has to deal with some of the wildest swings between prolonged drought and deluge the country has perhaps ever seen. So what precisely does he expect?

“There are a large number of companies in food and drink who are good performers. You don’t need to wave the big stick at them all the time”

Lord Smith has picked a good place to tell us. CCE’s Wakefield plant - Europe’s largest manufacturing and distribution depot - hasn’t sent a scrap of waste to landfill since 2009 and has cut its energy consumption by 16.5% in the past six years (it’s also the only site to have achieved ISO 50001 for energy management). For him Coke is an example of a company that has achieved a “gold standard” in environmental practice.

“There are a large number of companies in food and drink, and more generally as well, who are good performers and are trying to do the right thing,” says Smith. “You don’t need to visit every month and don’t need to wave the big stick at them all the time. The result is you have more time to worry about the places where real transgressions are going on.”

Around six years ago the CCE Wakefield site was being visited by agency officers about four times a year. Now it’s once a year on average because CCE has shown willing to work with the authorities.

Despite his fighting talk, Smith accepts that the number of prosecutions for food and drink companies breaching regulations has substantially reduced. Eighty per cent of food and drink manufacturers have received A or B ratings under the Environment Agency’s Operational Risk Appraisal, meaning the majority of operators are deemed “good” performers.

“On the whole, the food and drink sector is a pretty good bunch - if I had to nominate industrial sectors that are top of my list of worries for pollution, food and drink would be nowhere near the top,” says Smith.

But with more incidences of drought, the temptation for transgressions like Moy Park’s could increase. The agency worked closely with farmers and groups like the NFU and CLA through the drought, advising them on water use, abstraction and storage. It’s a collaborative approach that Smith wants to see played out to aid waste reduction. Latest Environment Agency figures show that despite manufacturer claims to have significantly cut waste, the industry’s production of waste rose from 2.5 million tonnes in 2010 to 2.8 million tonnes in 2011. Some environmentalists may charge that not enough is being done and the first ‘R’ in their mantra - “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” - is being overlooked.

“The failure to continue reducing waste is one area the industry needs to pay attention to,” says Smith. “However, the figure doesn’t indicate a major increase. I think it indicates a levelling off on the progress of reducing waste. The improvement in recycling and reuse is very impressive and that’s partly being driven by the development of anaerobic digestion and all the recycling that’s going on.”

Of course new initiatives to target future waste reductions can only happen with the say so of Smith’s new ministerial colleagues. And some commentators have suggested that the appointment of Eurosceptic Paterson - also an opponent of gay marriage - as the secretary of state with responsibility for Defra signals a significant shift to the right for the department.

Smith expresses misgivings himself about how European legislation affects food production and the environment.

“If I really wanted to sort out nitrate pollution, would I come up with the precise formulation of closed season and nitrate vulnerable zones on the table at the EU? Probably not. There are almost certainly more sensible ways of addressing nitrate pollution. The closed season [periods of time in which farmers are banned from using synthetic fertilisers] takes no account of climate change and assumes all rain falls in the winter and all summers are dry,” he says.

Smith also voices support for Oxfam’s calls last week for the EU to scrap its aim to for member states to replace 10% of their fossil fuel needs from biofuel sourced from crops because of the impact biofuel has on food prices. “It’s a very complicated issue,” he says. “Trying to drive biofuel use artificially by setting quotas and requirements ignores these complexities.”

Smith may sit in the House of Lord now, but he still knows how to talk like a gunslinger. And who’s in his sights.