Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (Waste Management Licensing) (England and Wales) Regulations 2006

rose to move, That a humble Address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the regulations laid before the House on 15 December 2006 be annulled (SI 2006/3315) 7th report from the Merits Committee. The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving this Motion I shall also speak to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2006, which are the main regulations that we are now going to debate. At last we have the WEEE regulations, seven years after the European Commission first proposed the directive, four years after the directive was agreed and with an implementation date that is some two years late. I welcome them like I welcomed getting to Kings Cross station when I came down on Monday and we were four hours late due to problems on the line: it was good to be there, but one wondered why we had not got there quite a lot earlier. Nevertheless, we need to put down some markers for the future because these are complex regulations and it is not at all clear that they are going to operate smoothly in practice. Today’s debate is perhaps a small first step in that direction. The Government are up before the European Court for what is called an infraction. Perhaps the Minister will comment on that in his reply. What I thought would be a fairly modest and mild debate was the subject of a vituperative Tory press release yesterday. I was denounced by a man called Alan Duncan; I had not heard of him before, but he is some bigwig in the Tory party nowadays. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, will have a word and tell him how we do things here. This kind of debate is a useful, low-key, not very political way of scrutinising European legislation. The regulations, which deal with the disposal of waste electrical and electronic equipment, inevitably bring a new collection of acronyms. There are designated collection facilities—DCFs—where people will be able to take and dispose of their waste electrical and electronic equipment. There are approved authorised treatment facilities—AATFs—where the equipment will be treated, recovered or recycled rather than being put in landfill. Producer compliance schemes—PCSs—are systems the producers will use to organise this. There is the difficult question of individual producer responsibility, which I shall deal with in a moment, and various others. The Explanatory Memorandum sets out clearly in paragraph 4.1 what the regulations are for, based on the directive. It says: "““These Regulations implement the main provisions of the Directive by introducing a waste management for WEEE in the United Kingdom that is intended to: (a) minimise the disposal of WEEE as unsorted municipal waste by establishing a network of designated collection facilities in the United Kingdom; (b) ensure that all WEEE from private households that is collected at such designated collection facilities is sent for treatment, recovery or recycling to authorised treatment facilities or exporters that are approved under these Regulations; (c) achieve the recovery targets set out in the Directive; and (d) provide that producers of EEE are registered and that they are responsible for financing the costs of managing the waste that arises from EEE in each compliance period””." This is, on the face of it, a sensible way of going about things. It is, however, an extremely complex scheme. I pay tribute to the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee, whose seventh report of the current Session is extremely useful and informative and will help people understand how we hope the regulations will work. A minor advance in House of Lords procedure took place during the Merits Committee. It was the first time the committee had taken oral evidence, which it took from three members of DTI staff. There has been talk of revolution this afternoon in your Lordships' House, but one of the things I have learnt since I have been here is that a lot of the useful advances and changes that take place are evolutionary. There has been a slight but important advance in the way in which we scrutinise legislation. Who is to blame for the delays? It would be easy for me to stand here and blame it all on the Government. I am not going to do that, although I think that mistakes were made in the early years. A lot of the blame has been associated with the requirement for individual producer responsibility—IPR. The European directive requires that this should be included in the legislation, but it is not because it has been discovered that it is technically impossible to do. It is almost certainly not being done anywhere else in Europe either. It is interesting that this was a result of the co-decision process—the negotiations between the Parliament and the Council—and the Parliament got the upper hand and insisted on individual producer responsibility. There are lessons here for all of us as politicians that high principles are fine but unless you work out how they will be carried out, they will not work and you will end up with a lot of delay and angst. My main concern about how these regulations are going to work is based at what is called the consumer level—the household level, at which individual people are throwing out this kind of equipment. The Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee had a long discussion about toasters—and the fact that the committee chose to have a long discussion about toasters from all the items of electrical or electronic equipment really says something about the Members of the House of Lords. A group of 25 year-olds having the same discussion would talk about iPods, not toasters. Schedule 1 of the regulations sets out 10 categories, and it lists lots of items within those 10 categories which range from large household appliances and big white goods such as fridges, freezers, cookers and so on; small household appliances; IT; consumer equipment, including TVs, radios and video recorders; toys; lighting equipment; and tools—anything at all that is powered by electricity up to 1,000 volts. What are people going to do under this new regime when they want to throw something out? Is anything significant going to change? In the very interesting evidence given to the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee, Mr Tony Pedrotti said: "““The consumer—you and me when we get rid of our waste electrical equipment—is going to be carrying on doing roughly what we do now””." If we are all going to carry on doing roughly what we are doing now, is this actually a major step forward? I question whether that is the case. People can take large items to designated collection facilities, which will be civic amenity sites or waste disposal depots; they can have them removed by people coming to install new equipment, but they may have to pay for that; or they can take it to a shop where they are buying a new item as long as it is the same kind of item—and under the new rules that shop may take it for free, or it may not. The shop may say that the customer has to go to the designated collection facility and, if that is three or four or 10 miles away, the item may go in the bin instead. Most small items are, frankly, still going to go in the wheelie bin. Toasters, kettles, clocks, CD players, mobile phones, iPods, little computers, toys, radios, electric whisks and electric toothbrushes will all go in the bin—even light bulbs. A curious thing about the regulations is that they will cover modern low-energy light bulbs but not the traditional filament light bulbs. The Minister may want to comment on that. Why does the legislation not include the collection authorities at local level? Why does it not include the district councils, which collect the rubbish, and not only the people who dispose of it? Councils could do this work as part of their general recycling work, which is pervasive throughout the country. Most people nowadays are asked to separate the recyclable stuff from the general stuff; in many cases, people are asked to separate the recyclable stuff into three or four different streams. Why on Earth is WEEE stuff not included in that system? If we are serious about increasing considerably the quantities recycled, that is the way we should go. It is said that on average we throw away 14 kilograms a year and the target is only 4 kilograms—and we are achieving that already. It seems to me that the fundamental fault in these regulations lies at the district council level. I hope that the Minister can reassure me on this matter and that he will at least say whether it will be looked at as part of the review, which I understand will take place fairly soon. We should wave through these regulations but they are going to run and run. There is talk in the Merits Committee of a review and a report to Parliament. We all hope that the measure works and that everyone involved will make a success of it—what the Minister might call stakeholders, but I do not. How long will it be before the scheme is assessed and evaluated so that we know how much of a success it has been? Will it be one year or five years? I offer the hope that when that evaluation takes place we shall have a further debate in Parliament to consider whether this legislation has succeeded or failed and what might be done to improve it. I beg to move. Moved, That a humble Address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the regulations laid before the House on 15 December 2006 be annulled (SI 2006/3315) 7th report from the Merits Committee.—(Lord Greaves.)