Mr. Séamus Clancy:

In response to Deputy O'Keeffe, Repak has no enforcement role to play other than to support enforcement through the provision of relevant information on retailers. We pass this on to the local authorities in order to support the Department, the EPA and the industry.

I would also like to correct a few things. The haulage sub-group had three meetings, one of which was attended by the IRHA. It did not come to the other two meetings, despite having been invited. On the issue of previous schemes, there were two such schemes, one, TWA, run by the ITWRA, and the other run by the ITIA, which was known as Tracks. Both schemes failed. The maximum ever number of members in Tracks amounted to approximately 800, though I stand to be corrected on that. It currently has approximately 90 members, while the ITWRA scheme has in the region of 30. We have no idea, however, as there are no websites or the like to confirm the size of these organisations. It is important to note that during the whole consultation process, even though Repak and almost everybody else consulted as part of the tyre working group meetings, the ITWRA did not attend any of them. I believe it attended two tyre group working meetings over the past two and a half to three years. The opportunity was there to consult and to contribute to all of the different working sub-groups, namely: distance sellers dealing with Northern Ireland; enforcement; finance; transition; historic stockpile; environmental targets; permitting; registration and reporting; agricultural; haulage; and end-of-waste criteria. Other meetings were held with all of the bodies as part of the consultation process, amounting to more than 60 meetings in total. It is very disingenuous, then, for people to claim that there has been no consultation on what has happened to date or what has been put forward in legislation. There are sections of the regulations that Repak does not like. In fairness to the Department, however, it tried to accommodate the needs and feedback of all of the stakeholders involved.

In response to the question about membership, there are, as I stated, 1,695 members current members of the scheme. Based on our research, we estimate there to be approximately 3,000 economic operators out there at the moment. Hence, compliance only stands at approximately 66% based on what is out there. This is based only on those who have joined; they still have to provide the relevant information. That is the next step. It is certainly a big challenge to establish the number of members and what they have out on the market. The overriding issue to remember, however, is that Repak has investigated all 20 schemes that have operated in Europe and not one of them is back-loaded. The reason for the latter is that this is a producer responsibility scheme, whereby producers take responsibility to ensure that the tyres they place on the market are managed in an environmentally proper fashion all the way to the consumer. This is also a cost-neutral scheme for all operators because, ultimately, it is the consumer who pays. I have here the invoices charged for tyres by of all of the different operators dating back to 2015, running from €1.60 up to €3.50 and beyond for truck tyres and so forth.