It’s rare that you get to do an interview where the subject feels free to speak his mind. Talking to Matthew Thomson as he prepares to depart from LCRN, and London, I’m struck by the similarities and differences to when I first interviewed him on arrival to the sector as Chief Executive of LCRN. The underlying ideology and belief in what’s possible remain undiminished, but the marks of the experience are apparent. “I feel aged, absolutely”, he readily acknowledges. After five and a half years, Thomson is preparing to return to his roots and head up Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen enterprise in Cornwall. The sector he leaves is quite different to the one he arrived in, which was at the time still ‘awash with money’ from the Community Recycling and Economic Development (CRED) lottery fund.

“Everyone smelt an ending. My predecessor left on a ticket saying there’s nothing left here and I was kind of swimming against the tide. People were bemoaning the loss of kerbside collection contracts. Nobody really felt recycling was going anywhere, even though reuse was beginning to awaken.

“CRED had ironically had no sense of building capacity or sustainability. It was hand to mouth. The DNA of the programme was not to engender enterprise and self-reliance.” Since then, the community waste sector has not attracted the same level of funding and, looking back, the difficulties it’s faced have been varied and numerous. It would be easy to highlight the diminishing support of government, but throughout the interview Thomson is particularly interested in the sector’s own internal difficulties and failures – his part in these included.

“We haven’t demonstrated our relevance and the need for us in the heart of our communities. That’s because we haven’t collaborated. As pedants we might eschew the recycling label if we’re into reuse, or the reuse label if we’re into compost, but actually for the public imagination all that activity is ‘closing the loop’. We have split at our peril.

“I’ve worked hard to be collaborative, but some others haven’t. When I started five years ago, some felt demand management, such as waste prevention, was for the ladies. I think the focus of the main waste industry on technology and kit, front-end logistics, has continued to dominate, but we’ve split our issue.”

Alongside this, there has been a failure to attract new champions. We might, reflects Thomson, be “dealing with the rump end of a 20-year bubble of environmentalism”. He adds: “I think we haven’t managed to pass the baton generationally. There’s more unemployment than before, so strictly speaking our offices should be brimming full of talent. We haven’t done that, we haven’t replaced the cash... Okay, we managed to get the Third Sector Capacity Building Programme launched in 2008 for three years. Five million quid, with WRAP taking a good 20 per cent of that in overheads and the networks taking a good slug of it, I think on the whole validly. There were some good projects the networks did.“

Indeed the challenges faced by the Community Sector Support Programme, aka REalliance, have been emblematic of the difficulties facing the sector. Thomson, who originally headed it up, recognises this: “I’m sorry I wasn’t capable of convening the big vision. For a little while, I fancied being able to do it, and obviously pride comes before a fall, and I didn’t bring anyone with me... I suppose my biggest regret is that we didn’t manage to create a shared vision of community-based resource management. The commonality – we couldn’t define it. We had moments but we couldn’t sustain it and I think it’s left our support networks not really knowing what their role is overall.

“We’ve focused too much on resource management. Actually, what I think we should have done more of is make community resource management part of every community organisation’s portfolio.”

It’s hard to disagree with this. While many of the success stories in the sector involve cross-pollination, there has been no sustained attempt to provide structure and support for this. But, I suggest, doesn’t this reflect that government departments struggle to recognise value beyond their own remit?

“The problem is not departments existing in silos”, responds Thomson. “The problem is the timespan over which the value is measured and the problem with our interventions is that quite often their benefit is felt a way away in time. We’ve seen some primitive instruments come into the market, payment by results and social impact bonding, they’ve got promise and I think the very daring among us will run after those.”

By way of example, he cites youth unemployment intervention in troubled areas that potentially avoids the cost of criminal activity and punishment. We might be on the threshold of a new phase for the sector, if similar mechanisms can be developed to finance avoided waste. For Thomson, the one thing above all others that has piqued his interest is this: “It’s demand management. Prevention is better than cure; it’s part of the reason I changed LCRN’s name to say ‘resource’ [instead of ‘recycling’]. We need to move upstream, so that in 10 years we can say the value will be this and then that makes the investment up front much more reasonable, so it’s less to do with silos and more to do with timespan.”

Politicians on all sides have at least talked a good game when it comes to the community waste organisations. A savvy political analyst, Matthew Thomson is incredibly knowledgeable about how those in elected public office operate. Whether it’s understanding how “Defra was conceived at 3am after 72 hours without sleep on Tony Blair’s election-battle bus” or how the Cameron government’s approach is an attempt to “return to an oldschool, upstairs-downstairs attitude with civil servants not wanting to get involved in the details”.

The sector will no doubt miss this insight and acuity, allied as it has been with access to senior politicians.

The problem with government, notes Thomson, has generally not been at the top. “I think politically they were listening”, he continues. “But I think we failed to get traction further down the chain. We weren’t taken seriously in terms of senior policy. The head of Defra didn’t see us as the top of his invite list. He tolerated us, he involved us in his stakeholder groups, but he would never come to us seeking advice, neither would senior mandarins. Further down the chain you had some quite entrenched attitudes to the sector, but the real failure to listen was at local government level. We just didn’t have enough local authority champions and the stereotyped role of a community organisation in a local authority imagination is pretty narrowly constrained.”

Often, this reflects the challenge of getting partnerships to work when the participants have different objectives. A case in point has been the perceived slow start by the London Re-use Network (LRN), a perception that Thomson feels is unfair. He notes that with 35 partners signed up in January 2011, it was inevitable that the “planning phase would be slower than expected; everything takes longer than you think, especially when you’ve got more and more partners involved”. LRN is now starting to deliver – the issue just wasn’t given a long enough runway to start with.

Reflecting on challenges faced getting REalliance off the ground, he points to key ingredients that make partnerships work: “Initially, we didn’t develop something strong enough, robust enough at the centre, to do the work needed on its own, and that the public-sector stakeholder with whom it was working would see and be able to step back a bit... I made mistakes without question, the biggest probably was underestimating the weakness inherent in complex partnerships and not mitigating against those.”

Looking forward, Thomson sees a bright future for the community resource sector, but one that’s noticeably different from the past: “When I arrived almost six years ago, the received wisdom was we needed more ECTs [ECT was the largest community group operating in the municipal recycling market, and was acquired by May Gurney in 2008], so we needed to scale up. I think the journey that we’ve been on has been towards scaling down, so when you look at London’s waste problem, yes there’s still 20 million tonnes a year being thrown away. The old question used to be: ‘How big can we make stuff in London to solve this big problem?’ Now, I think more people are saying: ‘How small can we make stuff to fit into neighbourhoods and pockets?’ We’re not there yet, but essentially there’s an emerging theme of urban resilience. How do you make the cities capable of withstanding big social and economic shocks whether it’s to do with riots, whether it’s to do with droughts, or water shortage, or austerity measures or unemployment or local food? There’s a huge array of initiatives now, which are basically focused on improving the resilience of cities and I see London at the forefront of that.”

For his part, Thomson is clearly relishing the opportunity to apply his varied experiences in his native Cornwall. He says of his new position: “It’s all about inspiring and developing people through food. Obviously that has very much a social and environmental footprint as community resource management, and in fact I think the resonance is high so I’m very excited about the prospect of the role.