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

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, clearly established what this legislation is all about. Curiously enough, I am more interested in the process behind the measure than in its implementation, but we should be aware of what we are talking about. I am told that people in this country throw away 5 million television sets, 2 million home computers and 8,000 tonnes of battery operated toys per annum. Since 2003, we have generated 3 million tonnes of electrical equipment waste. That is a huge problem. If it does not indicate what we are dealing with and why we need these regulations, nothing will. I am interested in the process behind the measure. It seems that the Government’s reaction to a European directive is that it is an act of God: there is an almighty flash of inspiration, the European Commission—in this case, God—comes up with a directive and the Government are totally surprised. However, that is not the situation at all. These directives do not come from above in a flash of lighting; they are the product of years of negotiation, in which our own negotiators play a very active role. If the negotiators and the Government have talked to each other—I assume that that happens—one might think that we and the Government would be ready to start doing something about a directive when it arrived, instead of being taken by surprise and spending two more years talking about it. There was a classic example of such an approach the other day, when my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, replied to my question on batteries. His answer was absolutely out of this world; he completely gave the game away. ““Ah, my Lords””, he said, ““the answer to that is that we have a directive coming””. The real question is: if a directive is coming and we know that there is a problem about which we ought to do something, could we not start to act without the directive? That is neither here nor there, but one wonders about the process in those circumstances. This area is particularly difficult, and I acknowledge the Government’s problems with it, particularly the liability of individual producers. As the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee pointed out, nobody has yet overcome that difficulty effectively. I suspect that a review may conclude that we have to wriggle round that provision or get rid of it. That is just a part of the problem of dealing with this matter but it does not excuse the delay. Getting rid of computers is very difficult. When you throw out a computer, it still contains all the information stored on it. Unless you take a seven-pound hammer to it and smash it into pieces so small that no one would take the trouble to do anything about it, you could be throwing away the records of your family finances, allowing access to credit cards and so on. It could be dangerous if the computer fell into the wrong hands. I know a firm in north London that makes a good business out of taking old computers, for nothing, and sweeping them until they are clean. Microsoft has given the firm permission to reinstall a somewhat dated programme, and the computers are sent into the community: to old people who want a computer, old people’s homes, hospitals and anywhere people may want the private use of a computer. The firm also trains people in computer use and so on and provides a wonderful service. I am not sure how that fits into these regulations, but computer recovery is a much better business than computer dumping. I agree that television sets cannot be recovered in that way, still less the proverbially difficult toasters, but there are other ways of dealing with aspects of this problem. Although I sympathise with the Government about the difficulties in these regulations, if we were awarding points on performance, we might give a high mark for artistic impression but a very low mark for execution, because we should have been at this point two years ago. That is a criticism. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has pointed out, this debate is part of the process of examining how we arrive at European directives. If there is a lesson to learn from what has happened in the infraction proceedings that have commenced, it is that we ought to take much more notice of what our negotiators are doing in Brussels so that we are not as ill prepared as we clearly have been when directives arrive from on high in a flash of lightning and take us all by surprise.