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Christopher Booker's notebook
By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:29am GMT 07/01/2007

It's official: the watchdog is barking

Anyone who thinks the Parliamentary Ombudsman is a benevolent institution set up
to protect the citizen against acts of incompetence and injustice by officialdom
might consider the dismal saga of Ross Donovan. Mr Donovan, as I have reported
here before, is the ingenious Bedfordshire engineer who devised a superbly
efficient and economical small-scale system that uses baled-up cardboard to heat
water.

His invention looked like being a godsend to all those businesses across the
country, such as those on most industrial estates, that generate huge amounts of
cardboard packaging that normally gets thrown away into landfill. Being a
careful engineer, Mr Donovan was keen to ensure that his device complied with
all the relevant EC legislation, so several times between 2001 and 2003 he
consulted the Environment Agency. On the basis of their advice, he completed a
prototype of his system, which saved a local plant nursery thousands of pounds a
year on its heating bills.

This was after he and his backers had raised more than £300,000. He tested the
market, finding great interest in his system. All was ready to go when, at the
last minute, in August 2003, the agency wrote to say that it had changed its
mind.

After looking again at the EC's waste incineration directive, it now advised
that, because Mr Donovan's system was powered by "waste", it would have to
comply with the same rules as a giant industrial incinerator. Although its
emissions were less than a domestic woodburning stove, so much money would now
have to be spent on regulatory requirements, which would nearly triple its cost,
that the system would be completely unviable.

In vain Mr Donovan was taken by his MP, Alistair Burt, to see Elliott Morley, an
environment minister, who said that if the system was fuelled by virgin
cardboard it would be fine. But because the cardboard had been used before,
under EC rules it was "waste", and would therefore have to comply with the
directive. One Environment Agency official later provided various judgments from
the European Court of Justice which seemed to suggest that waste used to
generate energy no longer counts as waste: but the agency said that this helpful
chap had been "misquoted".

Mr Donovan's company was forced to close and he and his backers lost all their
money. But then two things happened. First, Mr Burt was so shocked by the way
his constituent had been treated that he asked the Ombudsman to investigate.
Second, Mr Donovan, after a brief spell as a bread roundsman, found work in
which he has come across a variety of waste-powered heating systems, none as
efficient as his own, fuelled by cardboard, chipboard treated with toxic
chemicals and other potentially polluting substances. To none of these has
officialdom raised any objection.

His great mistake, it seemed, was to ask the agency for advice. As it happens,
his system was so small that it wouldn't have come under the regulatory control
of the agency anyway, but under that of local authorities. Had he just gone
ahead and marketed it, he would have had no problems.

But he has now been given a final kick in the teeth. After two years of spinning
it out, the Ombudsman, Anne Abraham, and her investigator, Christine Corrigan,
both with impeccable records in public service, have come up with a provisional
draft report. The agency, they find, did nothing wrong.

One paragraph I wish I had space to quote in full, because it shines such
dazzling light on the strange way we are now governed. It explains how the
agency could not have been expected to give Mr Donovan reliable advice on what
the EC rules meant because its officials had to spend months in meetings and
"workshops" trying to puzzle it out themselves. Indeed several times they had to
change their mind. It would therefore have been quite wrong for Mr Donovan to
depend on what they said at any given time. There is no way they can be blamed.
The role of the Ombudsman, it seems, is not to protect the citizen against the
system but, as some of us have long suspected, the other way round.

The irony is that, if Mr Donovan had not been responsible enough to ask their
advice in the first place, he would have got away with it, as so many of his
competitors have done. He might well now be running a flourishing business with
many satisfied customers. All that cardboard would no longer have to be taken
off to the local tip as "waste" but would be making a useful contribution to
reducing the nation's heating bills.

But we cannot expect the Ombudsman to see it like that. In too many cases it
seems her job is simply to find that the officials and the system are right.