National Waste Minimisation and Recycling Fund (NWMRF)
Round 1 of the NWMRF
Local Authorities all over England received a total of £42.4m from the National Waste Minimisation and Recycling Fund in 2002/03 to kick start new projects, with £7.6m set aside for the London authorities. The money was allocated to schemes to improve recycling and contribute to a better quality of life for residents.
From over 190 applications to the fund for 2002/03, 112 schemes
were approved by Defra with the help of an Expert Panel.
The assistance given by the Fund aided some of the least successful recycling Authorities in their efforts to reach a minimum rate of 10% in the following year. Neighbourhood Renewal was also identified as a key area of Government Policy and over half of the 88 NRU local authorities in England were low recycling performers. 21 NRU LAs were approved for direct grant, amounting to a total of around £14m.
Round 2 of the NWMRF
In December 2002 a further £76.3 million was allocated from the National Waste Minimisation and Recycling Fund to help local authorities set up recycling and waste initiatives across England.
From over 357 applications to the fund, 142 schemes were approved by Defra with the help of an independent Expert Panel. For further details of the funded projects see link below:
- Funded projects
(26 KB)
Defra were later able to allocate an extra £24 million of funding to be allocated following the reform of the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme and £20.4m and £3.6m were made available to the National and London Funds respectively. For further details of the projects supported see the link below:
- Supported projects (25 KB)
Rounds 3 and 4 of the NWMRF
A further £135m of funding was announced in October 2003 for a two further years of funding through the NWMRF, with £20.55m of this set aside for the London authorities. However, there were some differences between the way in which the first two rounds and Round 3 and 4 of the NWMRF were administered. Firstly Defra took the decision to operate a single bidding round covering both of the financial years with the theory being that this would provide greater certainty to authorities in making spending plans. The projects that were supported fell into two categories:
- Partnerships
- General Projects
Partnerships
In December 2003 we announced the group of 14 Partnership Projects that would be eligible for up to £5m of funding over the next two financial years.
- List of sucessful partnerships (11 KB)
These Waste Disposal Authority led initiatives covered 7.5 million tonnes of England's annual waste production and also benefit from Government Support services that are designed to help to deliver high quality environmental solutions. These two year programmes of work in the relevant local authorities were designed to expand the recycling and composting infrastructure including new and enhanced kerbside collection schemes, household waste sites and recycling facilities. The partnership proposals were also designed to deliver long-term waste management solutions to authorities with no existing facilities.
General Projects
Added to these partnerships, we also initially approved a further 51 schemes under the general projects heading that would receive support. Of these, 23 were offered support on condition that the relevant local authorities would work with the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) in order to develop an appropriate communications strategy to support their project.
- Projects with conditions (7 KB).
The remaining 28 projects were made unconditional offers as their communications strategy was already of the required standard.
- Projects without any conditions (12 KB)
The general projects benefited from up to £1.5m of funding for 2004/05 and 2005/06 and implemented a range of sustainable waste management solutions such as kerbside recycling and the development of Household Waste Recycling Centres. As a result, improved waste services have been provided to over 2 million additional households and approximately 300,000 tonnes of waste diverted from landfill per annum.
Page published: 14 June 2006