Greater London Authority Bill

The hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) made some extremely heartfelt comments, and it is possible that I would take a similar approach if I represented a seat in the home counties. In our defence, it should be said that we in London have the country’s noisiest and most polluting airport, which is now to have a third runway. I suspect that many of the hon. Lady’s constituents use Heathrow when they fly off on their overseas holidays. I was brought up not too far away from the constituency of the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West, and there were great battles in the early 1970s about the proposal for a new airport at Wing. That did not get built, and I am sure that many of her constituents were very much opposed to the proposal, just as they oppose a second runway at Stansted. To a certain extent, such things have a tendency to balance out. I turn now to the main subject of my speech. It is great to be a sparring partner for the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck), my next-door neighbour and colleague in Westminster. I suspect that, not for the first time, I shall support her Government rather than her amendment, but that is the way of politics. She made a heartfelt speech earlier, but there is a difference of philosophy between us. Opposition Members believe that initiatives such as the one that we are discussing should work from the bottom up—that is, that they should operate at a very local level. Recycling is a personal responsibility, and I recycle bottles, plastics and newspapers two or three times a week. For me it is relatively easy, as the nearest recycling point is only 50 yd away from my apartment. We must encourage people to take responsibility for their own lives, and recycling is an important thing to do. Therefore, in philosophical terms, it makes sense to focus on what happens at the local level in London’s 33 boroughs. I fear that the top-down approach exemplified by setting up a single waste authority would leave very little responsibility in the hands of individuals or local boroughs, and that it would not be an appropriate solution for the future. However, the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North will be aware that the Mayor of London has called for a single waste authority for London to be established, with a view to it taking over the waste functions currently carried out by Greater London’s local authorities and existing consortium arrangements. Perversely, that single authority would have the greatest impact on those London waste authorities that have the strongest performance. Earlier, my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett) said that Bexley had been a great success story, but the proposed arrangements would cause it to suffer something of a double whammy: having made the expenditure to set up a new incineration site at Belvedere, it would lose responsibility for it to the single waste authority. I share some of the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North about incineration, which is a terribly carcinogenic process. We must reduce the amount of stuff that we burn, and simply burying rubbish in the ground is in no sense a realistic solution in environmental terms. The fundamental point is that the London boroughs are closest to their communities, which makes them the best placed bodies to devise and promote arrangements to meet the many and varied needs of their populations. A single body would mean an end to the income that individual authorities can expect from the Government’s landfill allowance trading schemes, which are an important way forward. There would also be increased costs for council tax payers, passed on through higher GLA costs and a precept higher than the cost of authorities’ own, often highly advantageous, waste disposal contracts. It has been suggested that the increase in overall waste costs might be as much as 5 per cent. In addition, there would be a risk of creating a monopoly service that reduced the end benefits that authorities can obtain for residents and council tax payers in a competitive marketplace. Even if the powers of a single waste authority were confined to disposal only, the separation of disposal from collection would be enormously disruptive to the entire waste management chain—at least as it is organised in some central London boroughs. The ability of the authority to specify the types of material it would accept and the methods of transfer from collection to disposal could in practice lead to the imposition of a one-size-fits-all waste collection method. That is not the right way forward. Such a system is likely to suit the Mayor’s priorities, but it would fail to recognise the huge differences between London boroughs in terms of their population. For example, about 90 per cent. of Westminster residents live in flats or apartments—a great contrast with the situation in many outer London boroughs, which all have individual needs. Their ability to collect and dispose of waste in particular ways would be ruined under that one-size-fits-all proposal.