Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 2007

I see that our future is being voted on now in the other place, so we will have to prove that we are doing a really useful job of scrutinising the Government. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach. I have not been in Grand Committee with him before, so I am not certain whether this is his first appearance on the Front Bench. If it is, I congratulate him. He has been in the House for only five minutes, but he is obviously coming up the greasy pole quite fast. I have already heard him in debates in the Chamber, and I know that he brings a good deal of experience to the House. He asked about what is affected, and declared his interest. We do not decide; we are bound by the definitions in the directive, and they included plant pots. I shall answer as many detailed questions as possible. Some may require a note from me, but I shall get through as many as possible. We do not know how many man hours were used by the Environment Agency, but I can find out. There have been a number of prosecutions, and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, mentioned some of them. I am not sure whether he mentioned all of them, because sometimes prosecutions are brought not by the Environment Agency but by other bodies. Every effort is made to ensure compliance, and far more effort is now made than ever before. The definition of a small producer is where the issue of the £2 million and the £5 million de minimis comes in. I have a list of 19 technical changes that do not include the electronic system that I shall come to in a moment. One of them states that the current definition of a small producer is a business that has a turnover of £5 million or less. That needs to be corrected to refer to a turnover of between £2 million and £5 million. Under paragraph 3 of the Schedule, a small producer must have a turnover of more than £2 million. That is where that de minimis comes in in the regulations. I do not know whether to apologise or not, because I assume that every word in these regulations is vital. These are large, detailed and technical regulations. If things are simple, the chances are that they will be unfair, so making the system fairer makes things complex. The noble Lord could not find the reference to electronic means. Paragraph (5) states that a document may be provided by electronic means. The Environment Agency has put in place an electronic database for every port, and I understand that it aggregates the data for every quarter. I am pleased to say that I have not been on the receiving end because I am not the Minister for waste on a daily basis. It also provides aggregated data for the full year. The noble Lord is quite right about metal waste, particularly aluminium. I recall from two recent PQs that aluminium can be constantly recycled. Recycling is enormously beneficial in saving energy, bearing in mind the massive energy used to get the aluminium from the bauxite in the first place. Our aims are to meet the business targets that are shown in the regulations and get the UK to meet its directive targets. There is a joint-metals target for steel and aluminium of 31.5 per cent by 2008. That sounds a very modest amount, but enormous amounts of materials are used. The noble Lord also asked me about electronics and page 17. I am sorry; I wrote ““page 17””, but did not write the question down. Waste exporters will be required to provide details of the final destinations of shipments of waste overseas. This is intended to ensure compliance with the packaging waste directive, which requires that, when exporting to countries outside the European Union, an exporter must confirm that recovery or recycling at that site will be undertaken in conditions that are broadly equivalent to those prescribed by European Union legislation. It is illegal to export waste for landfill. I am not saying that that does not happen, but it is illegal. It is important that the final destination of the waste conforms to the standards we have in the European Union. That is checked. Visits are made to the sites—not a massive number, but I know from briefings for other questions that the Environment Agency and some local authorities have sent people, particularly to the Far East, to make sure that their waste is being dealt in an appropriate manner. That is a legitimate but expensive thing for them to do. It is part of making sure that we are operating in accordance with good environmental practice. The noble Lord mentioned the complexity of the system. The size and detail of the regulations are consequences of that. These regulations came out of a consultation with industry. I understand there were 53 responses and that, by and large, they were strongly in favour of the proposals. I do not think there has been any dissent, because this is a complex issue. We want to reduce the burden, and only about 100 companies will be affected. Being able to use electronic means of transferring information will save a good deal of time. There will be an increase in the agency fee for this, as there always is. The increased fee proposed is fairly modest: an additional £26 for a large processor on an existing fee of £2,590, and £8 for individually registered producers on their current fee of £768. The additional funds will be ring-fenced and will be used solely to fund further development of the system for the benefit of users. They are not income. They are designed to recover costs. I agree with virtually everything that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, but important and valuable though his contributions were, they go a bit outside the scope of the regulations—he is nodding. My colleague in the department, Ben Bradshaw, the Minister of State responsible for waste policy, has given robust advice about what ordinary citizens can do at the supermarket checkout when they have been provided with far too much waste. He said that they should leave it at the checkout. I remember reading that that had been tested in eight supermarkets around the country and the responses of the supermarkets were reported, but I shall not go into that now. The Advisory Committee on Packaging has set up an export taskforce that is examining the export market as a whole—where it is going, what happens to it and associated issues. There is far more work going on now than happened in the past because an enormous amount of waste has left the country and has been dumped in a bad or unsafe manner, and our job is to try to cut that out. If there are other issues of detail that I have not answered, I am happy to write to the Committee.