Greater London Authority Bill

Wandsworth, my Lords, just by Wandsworth Bridge. My noble friend does not know the West End of London—I am sorry about that. It probably happens in Edmonton as well, though. If you want to recycle anything, you have to wiggle through an unsigned place that is marked ““no entry”” and eventually you can find where to put whatever you want to recycle. Is it surprising, therefore, that the figure in the chart of percentages recycled is about 21 per cent? Last time I went to Oxford, the figure was 51 per cent because the people actually help you. They say, ““Put this there, put that there””. They will help you if it is heavy, and they clearly have an interest in what they are doing. I put this to the representatives from some of the London boroughs, who told me I was being thoroughly unfair. They said that waste from a country town or village like Oxford is different from waste from a town. I think that is total rubbish. It is nonsense as well. It is just not true. There are problems with people living in high-rise blocks of flats or even in small blocks of flats, but they can be dealt with. The argument against a strategic waste authority on the basis that the boroughs deal with it very well at the moment is not made at all. One also has to look at the other end of the waste. Where does it go when it has ended up in the tips? We see it go past us down the river to the landfill site at Mucking, which is nearly full, I believe. Some of it goes by rail, which, as chairman of the Rail Freight Group, I am pleased to see. The rest goes by road. There is no consistency or co-ordination. It would be a great deal cheaper if the whole thing from beginning to end was done on a strategic basis, with a target to reduce the volume that is not recycled. If we say that London cannot do it, well Hamburg recycles 57 per cent and Copenhagen 54 per cent. Even Milan—some people’s view of Italy is that it is a bit rubbishy, although it is not—gets 39 per cent. In America, San Francisco recycles 50 per cent and Seattle 58 per cent. It can be done. I suspect that other towns and cities do a lot more than that. I would fully support an amendment that requires the mayor to develop and operate a waste disposal strategy. The time has come to do that. My last issue is the vexed question of things called pedicabs, those lovely bicycles you see peddling around London with passengers in the back and sometimes a roof, sometimes with rear lights at nights and sometimes with flat batteries and rear lights. I have a personal liking for these things. Apart from cycling, they are very environmentally friendly. I got married in London about eight years ago up in Marylebone Road and came back to Westminster in a pedicab for the reception. It was safe; it was great fun; and I wondered why we do not see more of these. So I have been following their success or failure, not just in London but elsewhere, with a lot of interest. The real problem is that they go a bit slowly, taxis do not like them, and there is a debate as to whether they are a taxi or a bicycle for hire. There must be a question of insurance because clearly if they are plying for hire they must have proper insurance. I hope that there is an opportunity to table an amendment or two in Committee to require them to have insurance, which probably means a licensing system. I do not think it needs to be a particularly heavy licensing system. I believe that the mayor is in favour of pedicabs, as he should be because they are very environmentally friendly, and that many people in London like them. If they cause the odd traffic jam late at night, so does everybody else. I do not think that you should single out pedicabs just because they are going much the same speed as a traffic jam in some places. So it is important that they should be licensed. I would like to see framework legislation that could be applied much wider than London. Pedicabs started in Oxford where I live, and the local taxis got rid of them pretty quickly. That was a bit unfair because again they had been popular. There is a future in having properly registered pedicabs—people want that and the operators welcome such ideas—which are fully insured, fully registered, with probably criminal record checks on the drivers and so on, and making sure that they have basic safety things like brakes and lights, which I am sure they all do, but it would be a good thing if they did have them. Then I think they would be a good part of the London scene, particularly when the weather is a bit warmer.