DELAYING the building of a waste-disposal plant could have been the most costly mistake made in a generation. Treasury minister Lyndon Trott believes the panel of inquiry got it wrong on three major fronts in suggesting dropping the planned Longue Hougue incinerator:

n savings in the amount of waste the island will produce;

n the emergence of new technologies; and

n the contract.

The States backed the panel and sent the Environment Department back to investigate the issue again – it will report on generic solutions in December.

But Deputy Trott said that the House had made a real howler.

‘Acting on the advice of the Dadd panel may emerge as the most costly mistake this assembly has made in a generation, and I choose my words carefully, and indeed emerge somewhat more rapidly than the heralded technology.’

Consultant Enviros has been examining the work of consultants employed by the former Board of Administration when it recommended Lurgi’s £80m. incinerator.

Environment minister Bernard Flouquet revealed in the States that Enviros believed the previous research was thorough and competent. ‘They don’t believe the waste arisings, the potential for waste diversification, the predicted growth and the resulting facility size used in the previous strategy contained any significant errors,’ said Deputy Flouquet.

In its January 2005 report, the panel said it had ‘considerable doubts about the waste forecasts on which the proposed plant is based’.

It also said that the contract process had been too tightly specified too early and among its recommendations was to wait until the UK Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affair’s new-technologies demonstration programme had concluded.

The programme was expected to have 10 plants running by the end of 2006. To date, five contracts have been let and two plants are running, both composters.

Defra has said it will not meet its original target.

‘How wrong it appears we were to trust the panel’s advice in this respect,’ said Deputy Trott.

‘But that’s what we did and we sent the Environment Department back to the drawing board.’

Deputy Trott, a member of the former Board of Administration when it recommended the Longue Hougue plant, also questioned the panel’s recommended total service delivery contract.

‘The advice from the National Audit Office and from the Office of Government Commerce is that these complete-package, total-service-delivery contracts can be provided by only a handful of companies that can pick and choose the contracts they tender for and, as a consequence, not only does government often fail to obtain tenders but it almost always fails to obtain best value.’

That advice shows the panel ‘led us down the wrong path on the contract form’.

But deputy Treasury minister Charles Parkinson, who brought the amendment that sent Environment on a global search for solutions, rejected Deputy Trott’s stance.

‘I think we will end up with a thermal treatment plant that is very much smaller in capacity and size than the 70,000-tonnes-per-annum Lurgi one, which will save money,’ said Deputy Parkinson. ‘If we had procured the 70,000-tonner, it would have mitigated against recycling. The beast would require feeding and we would for the next 25 years be putting everything into it that burnt, even if it was recyclable, and that’s clearly environmental nonsense.’