Mr. John McLaughlin:

On the question of the local authorities re-entering the bin collection service, for us it is not that black and white. We have responsibilities and we work in partnership with central government all the time on many things. We have long established a transition and hugely evolved an industry over the past 20 years to where we are largely no longer collecting the bins, apart from a few here and there. We have left that to private industry, which has evolved quite well. There is no problem getting bins collected. They are not piling up on the streets, so that works very well. There is a wider debate, in which we have no problem engaging in the roundest way in terms of directly with the Government on any groups that might be formed and in terms looking to the future and what all that means.

Our colleagues in the other group set out some of the costs. Change to this will not happen overnight. There would be a transition period and a lot of thinking to do about the implications and the costs arising from going back to that. People might remember when we did that around the country, but we have gradually got out of that. In our overall system, we see the three different planks. One is the setting out of waste, then collection and then disposal. In our presentation we are flagging that disposal is the plank where we will have the most challenges in the future, because we are generating too much waste. We need to deal with how we handle that. We are exporting a lot of it and there are questions about how sustainable that is and whether we can get to a point where we can deal with it ourselves.

I will ask Mr. Scott to deal with the area of enforcement.