The minutes of the meeting of 20 October have been circulated. Are they agreed? Agreed.
Correspondence received by the committee since the last meeting has been circulated. The first item, document 2009/616, has been carried over from the previous meeting. It comprises a policy statement on tendering procedures from the Civil Engineering Contractors Association and a covering letter from the Construction Industry Federation. It is essentially about small and medium-sized enterprises not having a level playing field when tendering for public sector contracts. We discussed this before and will return to it. Very detailed information was presented to us which in some ways contradicts what the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government said to us. That Department is not fully responsible in that education, roads and various activities can be encompassed. We will discuss this further on another occasion. I do not want to just note the correspondence and continue on.
No. 2009/626 is a note on an informal meeting with Repak. It is proposed that this committee seek to improve the recycling of packaging waste by writing to the EPA and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government to improve data disclosure and the policing of the recovery and recycling of packaging. Repak and Department representatives were before us previously. I met Repak officials recently with the clerk to the committee and noted they were satisfied we had obtained information on the packaging directive as operated by local authorities. The information had not been in the public domain prior to our committee receiving it from each local authority through the Department. We have been asked to go a step further. Is it agreed to proceed by issuing letters to the Department seeking further information the next time it is collecting information? Agreed.
No. 2009/628 is correspondence from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. It is follow-up information from our detailed meeting on 1 September 2009 on derelict sites. The correspondence answers comprehensively many of the issues members raised.