On 1 April, health authorities and NHS trusts lost their immunity from
prosecution. They can now be found criminally liable if they fail to meet
all the requirements of the 1990 Environmental Protection Act and earlier
legislation governing the disposal of clinical waste in incinerators. ‘We
have asked for a number of our incinerators to be inspected,’ says Simon
Lyster, estate planning manager for North West Thames Health Authority.
‘But the authorities are too busy. They have been inundated with requests.
We are generally not able to do very much as we don’t have enough money.’

If incinerators fail to come up to standard then hospitals must submit
plans to upgrade them before September. In exceptional cases they may be
granted up to five years to comply with the regulations.

‘Many incinerators are diabolical to say the least,’ says Lynn Smith,
principal environmental officer for Westminister city council. Smith says
that many plants will need the full five years to upgrade to the standard
required.

Only a handful of hospital incinerators in this country reach the standard
set out under the acts, says Tony Mitchell, managing director of Grundons,
a commercial waste disposal company. When his company surveyed 60 hospitals
in England five years ago it found that many of them stored clinical waste
outside in plastic sacks open to vermin and cats and dogs.

Tim Brown from the National Society for Clean Air, which campaigned
for the abolition of Crown immunity, says he is disappointed that hospitals
have five years to improve their incinerators. But Lyster feels that he
has not had enough time to prepare for the changes. ‘The Department of Health
has offered us no advice. There is complete chaos in the NHS.’

In a report published this week, the RSPB and the Nature Conservancy
Council call for stronger legislation, stiffer penalities and tighter control
over the use of pesticides to stop the killing of birds of prey. These birds
are protected by law, but the law is hard to enforce and breaches are difficult
to monitor.

Gamekeepers are the main culprits, says the RSPB. They kill crows and
birds of prey in the belief that they take the eggs of their game birds.
Pole traps, which were outlawed in 1904, are still widely used. Poisons
such as strychnine are laid to control foxes and crows but kill indiscriminately.

The RSPB is calling for higher penalties. A gamekeeper in Herefordshire
who used a banned pesticide last year was fined only £1500. ‘To target
the individual gamekeeper is not very satisfactory as they are often under
instruction from the landowner,’ says the RSPB. The society has drafted
an amendment to the Wildlife and Countryside Act which would make landowners
more accountable for offences committed on their land.

The white tailed eagle, recently reintroduced to the Western Isles of
Scotland, is in particular danger. Of the 11 breeding pairs introduced to
the Isles in 1985, 3 birds have been killed.