New chair warms to changing climate

In November, Lucy Danger was elected as the new Chair of the CRN UK Board. Charles Newman spoke to her about the challenges facing the sector.

The story of the Manchester-based social enterprise EMERGE Recycling has resonance for most operating in the community waste sector. And, after ten years involvement, the resulting outlook of its Managing Director, and new Chair of CRN UK, will ring true for many.

"When we first started out there was virtually no recycling happening in Manchester and we did lead the way. We very much got recycling on the agenda and the way we did it was very much from the bottom up," says Lucy Danger. This was primarily achieved by delivering a multi-material kerbside service during the mid-nineties, demonstrating what could be done, as well as what didn't add up. "It was a very comprehensive service," she adds, "we pretty much did everything back then. As time went on and the economies changed for us we had to become a lot more pragmatic and we had to stop doing oil and batteries and things like that."

The initial motivation to get things moving was a response to plans to site a large-scale incinerator in East Manchester. At the time Lucy was working for the Citizen's Advice Bureau, and admits to initially being more interested in social issues: "It just started to dawn on me, how people living in poorer communities have much fewer resources to defend themselves, and end up having these big facilities dumped on them with very little consultation."

A campaign to challenge this proposal started, but like many working in the sector Lucy was drawn by the need to demonstrate the alternatives. A series of grants, drawn from European, national and local regeneration pots enabled EMERGE to develop and expand its kerbside service. "People talk about becoming independent from grants, but a lot of grants aren't just handouts, you have to deliver outputs for this money," she observes.

In 2003, Emerge finally obtained a contract from the council for the services it was providing - at one point covering approximately a third of all households in the city. However, this engagement has been relatively short lived as the Council sought an integrated waste contract.

"We've had good relationships with officers in the regeneration areas and, over the years, the Recycling Officers, but I don't think we ever properly got the support at a senior level in terms of our Waste Management Services department."

Emerge found that despite encouragement, when it came to issuing new contracts officials stated they would only choose services from larger companies due to economies of scale. It meant Emerge was excluded from the tendering process, an experience Lucy Danger notes has been shared by others in the sector. "There needs to be a fair way of competing...for a start we can't even get through the Pre-Qualifying Questionnaire (PQQ) stage because we're not deemed to be financially robust enough. It's all to do with the risk the council's do not want to take on."

Although her organisation has a track record, with enough years accounting under its belt to satisfy the PQQ, Emerge does not have enough capital to ensure it can deal with whatever problems might arise. Few community waste enterprises do, but from the point of view of local authorities, this represents an unacceptable level of risk. "There's this inflexibility, sort of like a lack of creativity on the part of local authorities," she says. "They're very conservative by nature, trying to protect themselves against the failure of a contractor. I can understand that, but at the same time there's all this talk about social enterprise at a high level within government and it isn't trickling down....We know right across the community waste sector that contracts are being lost left, right and centre to the private sector, so something's clearly going awry."

So what's the answer? Her response demonstrates pragmatism and strategic vision in equal measure. "Community sector organisations have got to diversify if they want to stay in the game. You've got to respond to the expanding needs and demands of sustainable resource management."

The practical solution for Emerge, at least in the short term, has been to explore other opportunities. The organisation runs a recycling service for businesses in the city as well as 150 schools, although financing the latter is about to enter a new phase as CRED funding comes to an end. In addition, it has begun to explore to potential for running an Appliance Reuse Centre (ARC) to provide a recovery route as the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive comes into force.

However, more needs to be done if social enterprises like Emerge are going to compete for public service contracts. This means coming up with a strategy to meet the financial requirements that local authorities look for in the procurement process. "Whether it's Charity Bank or ING Direct or whoever it is, we need to start having genuinely open and creative conversations with some of these financiers, as well as local authorities themselves," she suggests. "There's even a case for us also doing more with housing associations, they are very asset rich and politically and socially they're the right type of organisations for us to be aligned with."

Clearly, Central Government has got an important role to play in addressing these barriers. She makes reference to Third Sector Minister Ed Milliband's ambitions to see the number of social enterprises grow, though cautions against focussing just on creating more enterprises, when there is also a case for 'building on what we have got, and making those much more robust'.

"Ben Bradshaw also seemed very positive at the Furniture Re-Use Network conference. I did take the opportunity to meet him and I think the next step for the main networks is for us to agree a proposal to go back to Government with."

Indeed, recently there have been signs that the networks in the community waste sector are working more closely together. This is something CRN UK's new Chair is committed to: "I accept the concept that small is beautiful because again that's part of what we're about to some extent. But I just think the sector's support infrastructure should be working to one agreed plan and strategy

"I'd pose this more as a question to all of our members, speaking in the plural, all of our members, composting, furniture and recycling organisations. I think I'm partly qualified to do that because Emerge is a member of FRN, it is a member of CRN and it's also an affiliate of the Community Composting Network. There does need to be some member consultation because it is potentially fraught with difficulties, but we need to develop a shared vision and some shared goals as soon as possible and to try to take a bit of a step back from the current infrastructure situation to sort of think outside the box about how we can best meet the members needs across the whole of the UK."

She points out that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), not least Ben Bradshaw, have been calling for a single voice to engage with. "I tend to think one organisation could be better. From many conversations I've had there seems to be quite a lot of support for this already," she continues, citing the encouragement of officers and members in all networks.

"It really does need the Boards of these organisations to engage in this process... I feel that maybe what we need is a re-branded all singing, all dancing sector support body with regional offices able to support members locally."

An organisation like this, she believes, would be better resourced and potentially better placed to help members overcome the financial obstacles of the procurement process, potentially developing a type of insurance or bond to underwrite successful tenders.

Regardless of how the sector's infrastructure develops, Lucy Danger stresses the importance of providing a better account of what community waste enterprises do. "We provide a critical function, okay maybe our tonnages are not massive, but to suggest the sector isn't playing an important role in terms of getting the message out, showing that things work and doing the cutting edge stuff, has got to be nonsense."

Promoting this message requires approaching government in various ways. She believes the sector needs to be political, but augmenting this is the need to have evidence, not just in terms of environmental benefit, but also the softer outcomes. The best way to do this is to 'put forward cases of best practice. That's part of what we need to be putting to DEFRA, to both Ben Bradshaw and David Milliband'.

The same applies at a local level. "In the current economic climate, there's this new paradigm where partnerships are not only a buzzword, but actually I think can truly achieve more...there's no one way to market something and I think if you've got more proper genuine partners then you're going to engage with more people. And surely if we're not about anything else it's about trying to actually engage people out there in what we believe to be our vision, which is about a properly, a truly sustainable society."