New ‘streamlined’ WRAP confident it can provide good service

Louise Bateman

25th March 2010

WRAP says it is confident it can provide a good quality service to all who work with it when it takes over as the new single Government superbody on resource efficiency for England next week.

WRAP (the Waste and Resources Action Programme) will officially become the one-stop-shop on resource efficiency in England on April 1, after absorbing six other state-funded agencies.

The changes have led to a number of redundancies – at this stage still unconfirmed – and are expected to produce an ongoing annual reduction in costs of £5.2million from 2010/11.

The six organisations being folded into WRAP are NISP (National Industrial Symbiosis Programme), Envirowise, The Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse, Construction Resources and Waste Platform, Action Sustainability and the Business Resource Efficiency and Waste (BREW) centre for local authorities.

According to a spokesperson for WRAP, from April 1 all but one agency – Envirowise – will be fully absorbed under the WRAP brand.

“The Envirowise brand will continue for around three to six months but then work will all be branded WRAP,” said the spokesperson.

She told GreenWise the structural changes gave the new single agency “more flexibility to effectively react to both budgetary and policy changes.

"No guarantees" for funding for WRAP

“There are never any guarantees for funding for public bodies,” she said. “However, we are confident that we can continue to provide a good quality service to all those who work with us and that the new body will be far more streamlined.”

Through the restructure WRAP, which works closely with the agriculture, recycling, construction and retail sectors, is being organised under four separate directorates, including Design and Resource Minimisation, Market Development, Business Resource Efficiency and Diverting household and commercial waste from landfill.

“We will still be working with the audiences we currently work with: individuals, via our consumer campaigns, local authorities, and business and industry,” said the spokesperson.

Envirowise and NISP have been brought into WRAP’s Business Resource Efficiency directorate, while the functions of the CRR, CRWP (Construction Resources and Waste Platform) and Brew Centre for Local Authorities programmes will absorbed across a number of WRAP’s directorates, particularly around creating and extending markets for recycled and reusable materials, and engagement with local authorities and other external partners.

Extending traditional support work

In addition, as part of the re-organisation, WRAP will extend its traditional support work around waste and recycling, to include activities to design out waste, reduce unnecessary water use and minimise use of raw materials at early stages of the production process.

The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced last March that it was to create a single support agency on resource efficiency for businesses, organisations and households, following a review into ways to deliver a more coherent, simplified service.

Secretary of State for the Environment Hilary Benn said at the time, that some customers were “confused by the myriad of services and bodies”.

The single service is in line with the Government’s Business Support Simplification Programme, announced in the 2006 Budget to reduce the number of publicly funded business support schemes from Government from over 3,000 to less than 100 by 2010.

WRAP thinks it well placed to run the new superbody, pointing to a number of successes it has achieved in the last year. These include launching the Construction Commitment of ‘Halving Waste to Landfill’, a voluntary agreement with over 100 signatories.

It says it has actively supported 101 recycling businesses through “difficult times” contributing to £64 million of turnover growth in the sector.

It says it has also ended packaging waste growth in the retail supply chain, through the Courtauld Commitment, despite increases in sales and population and helped an additional 1.8 million UK households become committed to reducing food waste and 65 per cent of households to recycling.

Liz Goodwin, current chief executive of WRAP, is to continue in her role at the new superbody.