The
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs (Joan Ruddock): I know that the right hon.
Gentleman was not present when we began the debate in our previous
sitting, but there is a direct connection with the amount of waste that
we householders throw away every year, the majority of which goes to
landfill, producing methane, which is one of the most powerful
greenhouse gases contributing to climate change. He might not think
that it is entirely tidy to have the clauses in the Bill, but there is
an important
connection.
David
Maclean: The hon. Lady is right that there is a
connection, but why do we not have clauses on the amount of motoring
that we do, the cars that we buy and the contribution that transport
makes? Why do we not have clauses on peat-land bogs and upland
forests?
Joan
Ruddock: The right hon. Gentleman knows that all such
matters are considered in other forms of legislation. We can
do—we are doing—many things to try and move towards
having a low-carbon economy. However, we need the specific legislation,
because we are the only country in the EU15 that does not allow charges
to be applied for waste
collection.
David
Maclean: This Bill is a convenient vehicle for the garbage
clauses to be tacked on to. I am not suggesting that they are out of
order because the long title of the Bill permits their inclusion. It is
not just a matter of tidiness, although I do like tidy
legislation—and tidy everything, to be honest. The schedule is
inappropriate because it could disillusion the public with regard to
our main purpose. People in the pilot areas and in other areas will
struggle to put the right sort of material in the right boxes on
whatever day of the week the council deigns to turn up to collect that
sort of recycling material. When they get it wrong and are given
penalties, I am afraid that they will say, “Well, it’s
all this climate change nonsense and saving the planet,” and
they could become disillusioned about our main purposes. I will not
labour the point; I want to get on to the technical
details.
Mr.
John Gummer (Suffolk, Coastal) (Con): Will my right hon.
Friend press that point a little more before he gives it up? The
Minister is just wrong. The schedule will distort the Bill in a way
that will do damage. Already, local councils that tried to do what is
proposed for a pilot scheme have found it much more difficult than they
thought. At the moment, they—Tory as well as Labour
councils—are being blamed. The Bill is about too big a matter
for us to add to it this sectional interest, which the Government could
have put in the Finance Bill or a whole range of other legislation.
This shows that the Government have not yet realised what a huge
undertaking they have taken on. In a sense, they have not built up the
importance of the Bill.
David
Maclean: I agree with my right hon. Friend. I also agree
with the Minister that it is important that recycling is increased. We
need to educate the public to do that
better. I
would have liked to have seen the Government’s
“good” recycling scheme before going ahead with the
measure. I am appalled at how some things have slipped in the House
since the old days. When I was in government 10 years ago, we could
never have come along to a Committee and said, “Pass this
legislation. We will at some point in the future produce a good
recycling service, and we will produce guidance and standards on what
that is.” The Committee would have said, “Look, Minister,
we are not going to go ahead with that until you produce the
regulations and the
guidance.” Dr.
Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab): May I help the
right hon. Gentleman with an interesting quote? It states:
“Add
to that, the impact of methane leaching from the decomposition of
organic material which releases approximately 22 per cent of the
UK’s methane emissions and it is obvious why no serious policy
to combat climate change can avoid the problem of the way we use and
discard material
resources.” That
is a brief quote from the introduction to the Conservative quality of
life commission report, which was authored by the right hon. Member for
Suffolk, Coastal.
David
Maclean: Yes, of course it is terribly important. I do not
want to go back to the discussion that we had two weeks ago but, as
everyone admits, the rain forests are worth more than all the transport
emissions in the world and we do not have a big section in the Bill on
rain forests—the Government said, “Oh, it’s
covered, we don’t want to deal with that.” Biodiversity
is vitally important to saving the planet and it is not in the Bill.
Yes, garbage and recycling make a contribution, but they have a huge
part in the Bill, and it stands out like a sore thumb. It stands out
like a piece of plastic in the newspaper recycling box because it is
not appropriate to the Bill.
Mr.
Gummer: I hope that my right hon. Friend would agree that
it is important to remember that the domestic waste stream is 8 per
cent. of the waste stream as a whole, so even though the hon. Member
for Southampton, Test is right about those figures, we are dealing with
not the 92 per cent. but 8 per cent., and we ought to put that in
context.
David
Maclean: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. If the
proposal was for a waste reduction scheme or a garbage collection
scheme relating to all the garbage in the country, including the vast
amounts that the commercial vehicles pick up each morning in the giant
Biffa bins, or however else they collect it, I could understand it. My
right hon. Friend is right: we have a Bill on carbon emissions, setting
magnificent targets for 2050—which we can argue about ad
nauseam—yet we have a few clauses on trying to create five pilot
areas for a bit of domestic recycling containing weird and wonderful
ideas and penalties. The pilots concern five of the authorities dealing
with 8 per cent. of the waste in the country, so that is perhaps 0.1
per cent. of waste.
Joan
Ruddock: There are measures to deal with all the other
waste streams. I repeat that it is a specific necessity to deal with
household waste streams. The recycling rates of commerce and industry,
for example, are far ahead of household recycling rates. Regarding the
right hon. Gentleman’s comment about what makes a
“good” recycling scheme, on 19 June we issued the draft
scheme for
consultation. 10.45
am
David
Maclean: I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that latter
point and I stand corrected. I hope the draft scheme will be circulated
to members of the Committee. It is a pity that it is not in the room
for us to study as we go along.
If industry
and business are further ahead, let us have a specific Bill to lay out
all the proposals for dealing with household waste in separate
legislation, so that we can deal with it in detail. I do not want to
get bogged down on that point—it was an aside at the start of
the Committee. It is a pity that five or six clauses on garbage are
stuck in such a major Bill.
Mr.
Gummer: Will my right hon. Friend note what the Minister
said? The Government have done nothing whatever about the 20 per cent.
of the waste stream that is construction waste. They have not insisted
upon consolidation, they have not insisted that building
companies behave properly, and they have no arrangement to help the
links between local authorities and the building industry. We have the
worst record in Europe, and the Government have done nothing. They have
not even bothered to deal with the matter in the
Bill.
David
Maclean: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for those
detailed observations, which I will leave for the Minister to respond
to. We could do much more to use construction waste in recycling,
whether in concrete blocks or road building and so
on.
Gordon
Banks (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Lab): Will the right
hon. Gentleman give
way?
David
Maclean: No, I do not wish to go down that route now, I
wish to consider the amendment and explain what it is about.
Amendment No.
108 states that
“the authority
proposes to collect residual domestic waste at least once in every
seven
days,”. I
suggest inserting that requirement into proposed new paragraph 2(2), so
that a waste authority could create a waste reduction scheme. It would
be allowed to do that, providing that it satisfied qualifications (a),
(b) and (c), and that it collected waste every seven days. It would
also be able to collect all recyclable material.
I then
propose an alternative amendment, suggesting that authorities should
collect every 14 days. An authority might not want to collect every
seven days, as it believes that it has a good scheme collecting every
14 days. I personally think that that is too long and I am disturbed
that some schemes collect garbage only every 14 days. However, in
recycling garbage collection pilot schemes, collection up to 14 days is
legitimate, so the option exists.
With my dodgy
legs, I find it difficult, staggering with different boxes to the
recycling bins, but I do my best to recycle. However, I am appalled to
see the many rules that exist in district councils in different parts
of the country—even in my area of Cumbria between Carlisle and
Eden. There are different collections on different days. Some take
paper but not cardboard, others allow paper and cardboard in the same
box. There are numerous definitions of plastics. God help a person with
a carrier bag full of plastic bottles that they are stuffing into the
holes. If they stuff the carrier bag in with the bottles, they are in
deep trouble. That will be a criminal offence, so they must go to
another bin to dispose of the plastic bag.
There are
different kinds of cans. I can tell the difference between a tin can
and a Coca-Cola aluminium can, but the hassle involved in separating
all that stuff in some ways prejudices me against recycling. It would
be easier to put everything in a big bag and dump it at the tip. I do
not do that, but at times, one is tempted. I can see that many others
have been similarly tempted because of the sheer hassle of trying to
separate things into too many different categories.
When I come
to London—many of us have homes in the Westminster
area—it seems to be all-in-one recycling. What is Westminster
council doing? Is it doing it correctly, or wrongly? I assume that it
is doing it legally. In the Westminster area, provided there are no
food scraps, garbage or bits of cling film from food, all plastics,
glass
bottles, tin cans, containers, newspapers and card
of whatever description—glossy Sunday colour supplements and
ordinary newspapers—go into one recycling plant. I do not know
how the council sorts it. I do not know if the council sorts it. Much
of it may go for power generation, or incineration to create power. It
is so convenient for householders that it is much easier to do and we
are not prejudiced against doing
it. Miss
Anne McIntosh (Vale of York) (Con): Perhaps I can help my
right hon. Friend. I followed the rubbish from Westminster to its
ultimate destination, which is SELCHP—South East London Combined
Heat and Power. I challenged the Minister about what is, in my view, a
missed opportunity in the legislation, and about the need to educate
people about what such schemes do. My right hon. Friend may not know
that despite its name, SELCHP does not at present have a combined heat
and power facility, or it may have just got
it.
David
Maclean: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that
elucidation. The next time she is following the garbage truck, I would
be grateful if she could call by my flat, because I have a huge bit of
polystyrene wrapping from my last printer that needs to be taken to the
tip. Ms
Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab): As
a Member of Parliament whose constituency covers Westminster, may I
inform the right hon. Gentleman that Westminster council has one of the
worst recycling records of any local authority in the country? Whether
waste is combined or separated, let us not be deluded into thinking
that that in itself is the solution to the
problem.
David
Maclean: The point is that Westminster council seems to be
able to collect combined material from householders and do some
separation. Presumably, it does not burn the glass or the metal in the
power plant. It is able to separate that, I presume, and then burn the
plastics and the paper. It has made it simple for householders by
encouraging householders to use it. I see an awful lot of commercial
waste lying around the streets from shops, pubs and cafĂ(c)s, which
is presumably much more difficult to separate.
My amendments
make it clear that any waste authority that intends to set rules for
recycling must accept all possible plastics, paper and recyclable
material. The hon. Member for Northavon is right. Once one starts
specifying Tetrapak or the type of plastic, one gets into difficulties.
I do not want to do that. I tabled the amendments in this form so that
I could provoke a debate. I want at least one of the schemes to suggest
that it will collect the residual domestic waste, as the Government
have termed it—that is, the garbage, the food scraps, or what
has not gone into compost—and take everything else in a limited
number of containers.
My worry is
that if an authority designs a scheme whereby it charges for the bulk
of the garbage left—the residual domestic waste—or the
weight of it, that may be legitimate, in order to minimise residual
domestic waste either in bulk or in weight. However, if the authority
then says, “Aha! We’re going to take only little plastic
bottles, and we are not going to take polystyrene. We will not take
cardboard or Tetrapak. We will take only the following materials,
separated into three or four types”, it automatically forces
householders to have a lot more residual domestic waste.
Householders
will have to stick the polystyrene, the Tetrapak, the unacceptable
cardboard or the mixed bit of plastic and paper into the residual
domestic waste. I bought a new printer yesterday and I could not get
the plastic off the cardboard. It is difficult to separate some of
these things, and one ends up throwing them into the
residual domestic waste because one cannot take the risk of
putting them into the cardboard or into the plastic.
By being
ruthlessly discriminatory as to what they will accept as recycling
material, local authorities could design recycling schemes that force
people inadvertently to increase the amount of residual domestic waste.
Local authorities could then put a charge or tariff on that, which is
unfair on householders. My amendments seek to tell local authorities
that they cannot do that. If a local authority intends to be ruthlessly
tight on the amount of garbage—I apologise for using the
American word, but it is easier than “residual domestic
waste”—on the food scraps and the bits that have to go
into garbage, and if it proposes to penalise or charge householders who
produce more than one little bag of garbage, there is a duty on the
local authority to say, “However, we will take all the plastics,
glass, bottles and cans in three simple boxes, or one multi-recycling
container.”
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