WEEE Directive

The hon. Gentleman anticipates my later comments. I think that probably every house in the country has a VHS recorder in a cupboard somewhere that will shortly be taken to a waste disposal site. Another element is that many electrical goods are difficult and expensive to repair, and there is a general lack of repair facilities even when the fault is relatively minor. A worse vice to lay at the electrical industry’s door is the phasing of innovation to boost consumption artificially. DVD players were released, and a year or two later when most of them had been sold, out came DVD recorders. There was a push towards widescreen TV and when everyone had one, along came high definition TV, which is not available on the previous widescreen TVs. Flip-top phones were introduced and MP3 players were added later, but it would have been possible to do that earlier. The industry markets sophisticated computers and then changes the software so that a new computer must be bought. The result is that the life of electrical goods is short, even when quality is good. Much waste is either workable or reparable, unlike the car of the 1960s. There are huge quantities of 14-in and 15-in cathode ray tube monitors gracing every tip throughout the UK, and there is no reason to think that the trend will change. As the hon. Gentleman emphasised, the digital switchover will, if anything, accelerate that trend. As with the advent of 3G networks, the arrival of Windows Vista will add to the mountain of computers, TVs, phones and VHS recorders. The benefits of innovation are sometimes uncertain, but the effect on the waste stream is in no doubt. The WEEE directive endeavours to address the issue. Before discussing it in detail, I want to highlight two fundamental questions without going into them in depth. I want to park them. One issue is necessity: why the directive is necessary. Leaving aside the hazardous substances issue, if the waste is inert, the production materials are plentiful, consumers are happy, employment is maintained and the cost of recycling and reuse is high or intensive in energy consumption, why should we have the directive? I shall not go into that, but I am raising the matter simply to point to the fact that it exists. Even if the waste is a problem and worth addressing—I think it is—there is still the question of whether that should be done on a European basis. During a debate in the House of Lords, Lord Willoughby de Broke went into the matter in depth, and asked whether we needed a European solution. Unlike rules on air quality and rivers, it is not obvious that a pan-European solution is necessary rather than national solutions, although any national scheme based on producer responsibility would have to come to terms with single market regulations, which may be why we are approaching this problem in a pan-European way. I wanted to highlight those problems, and park them, because I want to deal with what we have got. I am broadly sympathetic with the thrust of the directive. I view old machinery fondly as children of the human spirit. I grieve over old TVs when I throw them out. I even repair old computers and printers, and am something of a specialist on Hewlett Packard. I am emotionally shocked by skips full of perfectly usable equipment and repelled by the apparent wastefulness. The WEEE directive tries to reduce the waste stream, and its policy is straightforward. It sets targets for reuse and recovery; it makes producers or importers liable for meeting those targets and, in so doing, it hopes to provide a stimulus for less wasteful production and better design. The general brief or prospectus is agreed and clear, and most people are sympathetic, but its economic effects are unknown. They may add to consumer costs, which to some extent depends on whether the recycling and reuse market is profitable in the long term. I believe that it can be, but I am not certain. The big problem is not the prospectus or its economic effects, but the practical implementation. The correct EU phrase for what the Government are expected to do is ““transposition by the national state””. I have some sympathy with the Government because the directive is complex to transpose. There are distinctions to be drawn between historic pre-2005 waste and new waste, and between householders, who essentially have free disposal, and the rights of corporate customers, who have limited liability when not exchanging like-for-like-goods, but I believe they have a right to the collection of goods. It is difficult for all nations to interpret their version of what individual producer responsibility amounts to and to work out how the directive’s overall objectives will be achieved. There is difficulty when discussing product types, which is important in cataloguing waste and billing it. There are different systems and different categories in different countries, and there is debate about whether something falls within the directive because it is a non-fixed asset and whether CCTV and so on is not covered because it is a fixed asset and part and parcel of a building. National schemes are supposed to clarify those complex issues, and in the UK, rather than take a scheme off the peg from Johnny foreigner or whomever, we have devised our own—slowly, it must be said, because we have been warned several times to get on with it, and in our own individual way. To be fair to the Government, they have had all the usual accoutrements that one would expect to find attached to new legislation. There have been consultations, roadshows, notification to all the various bodies, and, as is always the case, a massive proliferation of acronyms, which so far I have managed to avoid using. Essentially, the Government are seeking to stimulate or construct a network of responsibilities between producers, who are ultimately the funders, consumers, who have the stuff, waste collectors and receivers, who are normally but not exclusively local authorities, and recyclers, who are usually private companies or social enterprises. For the whole system to work and to hang together, each must understand their part in it, and they must be willing to play their part in a complex operation. The ““understanding”” aspect has been extraordinarily slow and, perforce, difficult. Again, however, I have some sympathy with the Government’s problem in getting their message across, because an awful lot of people do not wake up to the imperative of new regulations, or of any change until it hits them. No matter how many prospectuses and advanced notifications one gives, many people work on a need-to-know basis, and respond, sit up and take note only when the regulations impact. Research shows that only 2 per cent. of the public know anything about the directive, so we in the Chamber are a privileged group. Worse still, 43 per cent. of big producers are generally unsure about the demands that it may make of them, and 70 per cent. of small firms do not know that it exists, which is worrying.