| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
5.1 pm
Norman Baker (Lewes): I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Ms Walley) on her speech. She has been consistently sound on the environment, and I, like many others, am disappointed that she has not been given a job in the Government. Her expertise should have been put to more constructive use than it has been.
I welcome the Minister to his post and congratulate him on his promotion. When he comes to understand the scale of the waste and GM problems, he may want to scuttle back to the common fisheries policy.
The Minister for the Environment (Mr. Elliot Morley): No.
Norman Baker: Well, time will tell. The Minister certainly faces major challenges, not least in taking on
the Treasury. Even if he sorts out his own Department, big problems elsewhere have to be solved. That will be a key matter for him. If his predecessor, for whom I have tremendous respect, was not able to do that, it will be a real challenge for the Minister, and the success or failure of his time in Government will depend on it.The waste problem is enormous, and the Government face several prongs of attack. First, there are the EU directive requirements on landfill. Secondly, the Government's own recycling targets are difficult to meet, given the base from which they are starting. Thirdly, the cost to UK industry of disposing of solid wastes, liquid and gas is £15 billion a year, which is 4.5 per cent. of annual turnover. That is a gigantic cost to industry. Peter Jones of Biffa Waste Services has said that waste management will be in crisis in five years and that it will cost the UK economy an additional £2 billion a year.
The problem exists and is running away with us. The Government do not have time to take a leisurely approach. They need to move up a couple of gears, as the two Select Committees have said. The Minister does not have time to set up a couple of task forces and working parties that will return in 12 months to tell him what we already know. He must get moving, and we need action from DEFRA this year and from the Treasury in the next Budget.
The waste that is being generated is increasing. Our first problem is that we are not cutting waste, but getting further from the European landfill directive targets. The proportion of municipal waste is declining, according to the Environmental Audit Committee report, but the overall amount of waste sent to landfill is increasing: it was 21.9 million tonnes in 1999, and 22.1 million tonnes in 2000. As the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North said, every hour of every day, enough waste is produced in the UK to fill the Albert hall. We know, at least, courtesy of the Select Committee, how many waste holes it takes to fill the Albert hall.
Some 65 million tonnes of rubbish was dumped or buried in this country last year. That is a gigantic amount. There is a whole series of waste streams, and I fear that each must be tackled individually. There is no simple answer; the answer differs for each waste stream. Some 6 billion—I have checked this figure to make sure that it is right—disposable nappies ended up in landfill sites last year. Some 24 million car tyres and 94 million fridges were dumped. About 5,500 tonnes of furniture—equivalent to 82,000 double beds—and 226,000 old cars were dumped in the countryside and elsewhere. Around 32 million printer cartridges were buried. The list goes on and on. The problem is enormous, and we must stem the waste stream. Unfortunately, a lot of the waste is ending up in the countryside. In an answer from the Minister's predecessor to me on 4 March, fly tipping last year led to 600,000 tonnes of waste being deposited on agricultural land alone, never mind all the bits and pieces around our towns and cities. That is an enormous amount of waste. I could list what that constitutes, but time does not allow.
Fly tipping is getting out of control. One of the problems is the lack of enforcement. People fly-tip because the Government are, correctly, increasing the cost of landfill, although I should like to see it increased faster, but they are not putting in place simultaneously measures to ensure that those who fly-tip are, if possible,
caught, prosecuted and fined. That does not happen. A further parliamentary answer on 20 March from the Minister's predecessor showed that in 2001 there were only 225 prosecutions for fly tipping although 600,000 tonnes of waste was fly-tipped. It does not take much imagination to work out that it is in people's interests to fly-tip because they are not likely to be caught, and even if they are caught, they will probably get away with a minuscule fine. We must clamp down on fly tipping more effectively.The Government have the hierarchy right and so far they have been good in theory, but not in practice. Everybody in and beyond the House is signed up to their hierarchy. It puts waste minimisation first. We all agree that we should cut waste, but we know that that is not happening. Waste is increasing in volume. What are the Government doing to minimise waste? We hear a lot about recycling, and we hear about incineration and landfill, but we do not hear anything about waste minimisation. I see no indication that the Government have grabbed hold of this at all.
It is difficult because some of these matters are EU competencies and many Members do not want to see any taxation on virgin products, which would go some way to dealing with waste minimisation. Instead, the packaging directive simply encourages more recycling. That is good as far as it goes, but it does not deal with the volume of packaging produced in the first place. We must improve on waste minimisation.
The report from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee at paragraph 17 states:
- "measures to encourage waste minimisation [in the UK] remain very weak."
- "No target has been set for waste minimisation. The resources available under the National Waste Minimisation and Recycling Fund have been largely directed at recycling projects rather than waste minimisation efforts. Few other levers to stimulate waste minimisation exist to compensate for this. We agree with the OECD's assessment that UK measures to encourage waste minimisation are very weak."
Reuse is the next part of the strategy. It has its merits. There are still reuse schemes. I am happy to say that there is an excellent one in my constituency for Harvey's beer. The brewery has returnable bottles, which are still used by large numbers of my constituents, myself included, so I declare an interest. I know that it is not possible to have reuse schemes across the whole country. The long distances and the environmental life cycle analysis would not justify it, but surely we could do more to encourage it. What are the Government doing, for example, to ensure that we do not lose our milk rounds? Plenty of milk is still delivered in glass bottles. The average milk bottle has a life expectancy of 17 trips. The same does not apply to plastic bottles from supermarkets, yet supermarket plastic milk is cheaper by and large than milk delivered in glass bottles on the doorstep. That is a perverse economic incentive not to use the best environmental option for buying milk. What are the Government doing about reuse?
The Government's concentration on recycling has not always been successful. In 2002, we recycled only 5.7 per cent. of organic waste, compared with 75 per cent. in Austria. We recycled 47 per cent. of card and paper, compared with 90 per cent. in Germany. We are near the bottom of the EU recycling league table. It gives me no pleasure to say that, and it is no reflection on a particular Government: that is where we are as a nation and we must address the problem much more effectively.
When I visited the constituency of the Minister's predecessor, the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher), I was astonished to find that Oldham borough council, in a building that it was demolishing, had to pay £9 per window to recycle the window and reuse the pieces but only £5 to landfill the window. What kind of incentive is that? It is, again, up to the Treasury. The economics must be right so that individuals, businesses and local authorities can take the right environmental decisions. Currently, they take decisions that are financially, not environmentally, beneficial.
The Treasury has a major role, which it is not discharging in the way that many of us want. It must ensure that the environmental option is always the cheaper one. That is not the case at present.
The Government should say firmly that they are in favour of doorstep or kerbside recycling for every household in the country and ensure that they will the means for it. My local authority in Lewes is struggling to introduce doorstep recycling: it is trying to roll out a scheme but finds that it is cheaper to carry on using landfill. That is mad. We have challenging targets and EU regulations, with penalties for non-compliance, yet councils have to landfill because they do not have enough money to set up doorstep or kerbside recycling schemes.
Mr. Peter Ainsworth: I am sorry to hear what the hon. Gentleman says about his constituency and about Oldham, which is controlled by the Liberal Democrats and has one of the worst recycling records in the country. How does he explain the fact that there is a doorstep recycling scheme in my constituency and that an excellent one has recently been introduced in Wandsworth, where it has proved extremely popular?
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |