Climate Change Bill [HL]

As we enter the last laps of Committee, I hope that your Lordships will be pleased that we managed to get the announcement of the chair designate to the climate change committee before the end of Committee stage. I hope that that will be a reassurance for Report stage. Part of the Bill has been completely rubbished and dismissed as trivial or insignificant. All I can say to noble Lords is that they should thank their lucky stars that it is in the Bill anyway. That is the reality. Looking for a parliamentary vehicle and at the overall policy objectives, it was that or nothing, and the pilots are important, as I will explain. We do not consider this a trivial part of the Bill and I will not have the answers to the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, in the sense of timing of other processes, because they will flow from the pilots, which are only about household waste. There are plenty of other areas where we are working on minimising waste in industry. However, some interesting points have been raised and questions asked and I will do my best to answer them. I hope that it will set the scene. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, I will deal with some of the details in the amendments, although I hope that I will have to deal with each of the points only once if I can satisfactorily answer your Lordships. Clause 51 introduces Schedule 5, which is a different exercise to the rest of the Bill. It produces a legislative framework for any waste collection authority to set up a waste reduction scheme. Waste reduction schemes may have an important role to play in encouraging people to throw away less and recycle more. We need to send less waste to landfill. At the moment, 3 per cent of all UK greenhouse gas emissions come from the methane from biodegradable waste in landfill. We have made good progress in recent years. I have answered Questions from this Dispatch Box in the past couple of years. Household waste recycling has quadrupled in the past 10 years. It is just over 30 per cent in 2006-07. But as has been said, we lag considerably behind much of the rest of Europe and therefore we need to do much better. Householders have a vital part to play. As has been said, municipal waste accounts for over a quarter of the waste sent to landfill in England; and household waste forms a large part of that. The research shows that waste reduction schemes could help. For instance—I will probably give other examples as we come through the amendments—a scheme in Sweden saw residual waste fall by 45 per cent in the first year of the scheme and waste separated for recycling and composting rose by 49 per cent. In Seattle, where householders pay according to the size of their bin, recycling tonnages have increased by 60 per cent and participation in recycling has increased to 80 per cent. What is said is trivial but we are proposing modest powers in this legislation to enable up to five local authorities to pilot waste reduction schemes. The factual briefing note that I sent to noble Lords recently included information about how these schemes could work in practice. In outline, under the proposed powers, householders who throw away the least will receive a rebate from the authority. In some schemes, householders who throw away the most could pay more. However, all the money raised that way will have to be paid back to residents. That revenue-neutrality condition offers an important protection for local residents. It means that, overall, they do not pay any more to the local authority. The requirement on authorities to keep a separate account of charges and rebates under the scheme will allow residents to assure themselves and the people who watch local authorities that the revenue-neutrality requirement is being met. The pilot authorities will be able to integrate the rebates and any charges within their local council tax system. The Government are keen to ensure that the necessary protections for people and the environment are in place, so the pilot schemes will need to take account of potentially disadvantaged groups—maybe large families, people living in flats, and so on—and provide a good kerb-side recycling service and have in place a fly-tipping prevention strategy. Those are all points that we shall come to in detail later. These requirements will ensure that important protections are in place both for society and the environment. My plea to noble Lords is that we have to be able to give local authorities as much flexibility as they need, once we have set the basic framework. They are the professionals with enormous expertise—and, of course, with lots of experience of co-operating with industry as well. But we need them to look at cost efficiency and to reflect local needs and circumstances. The five areas will not all be the same, which is the whole point of the exercise. That is why I say in advance that I will have to resist amendments that seek to impose unnecessary restrictions on authorities, including additional requirements around fly-tipping prevention, which they have to deal with anyway; packaged and kitchen waste; limits on the way in which local authorities can administer charges; and requirements that schemes cover the whole area, not part of it. We have to give local government some degree of flexibility. Similarly, we want to ensure that as central government, we have sufficient flexibility to amend parts of the proposed legislation in the light of what we learn from the pilots, which, after all, is what they are. We have been careful to ensure that Parliament plays a full role in any such changes. These are new powers for England and we think that piloting is the sensible approach. Up to five pilots will allow us to look in depth at the impacts of a variety of schemes in different areas. In principle, piloting is a good idea. It was one of the things that shadow Ministers were warned about, on the approach to the 1997 election, by retired civil servants, business folk and academics when we were thinking about what we would do in government. They warned us that where there are new schemes, whatever they are, and we can pilot them, we should attempt to do so. Past evidence is that that is a much more successful way of legislating and bringing about change than a one-size-fits-all, do-it-overnight for the whole country approach. We have had too many disasters not to learn the lessons. It is up to local authorities to bring forward their own proposals on how the schemes will work, including how long they will last, for example. We need to be responsive to the bids, rather than attempting to prejudge what we want them to look like. Of course, we will involve Parliament in the decision-making process. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, asked some specific questions, which I shall do my best to answer. He asked whether the principle was right and why we should target householders at the point of collection. Would it be more cost-effective and less administratively and politically difficult to take action in other ways, such as with regard to kitchen waste, use-once bags, and commercial and trade waste? The Government are clear that all sectors need to take action to reduce and recycle their waste. However, householders have an important part to play. As I said, 27 per cent of waste is sent to landfill. This measure complements action elsewhere; it does not replace it. Nor is it forcing authorities to come forward as pilots. It is completely up to them to decide if it makes administrative and financial sense. Evidence shows that waste reduction schemes can make savings for authorities. The Government have already taken action on packaging. EU packaging waste targets to be achieved by 2008 have raised the recycling rate in the UK for packaging waste from 27 per cent in 1997 to 56 per cent in 2006. Meanwhile, industrial and commercial waste to landfill has fallen from 50 per cent to 44 per cent over a four-year period from 1998-99 to 2002-03. The waste strategy for food waste from kitchens to 2007 already encourages local authorities to offer separate collections, and the waste resource and action programme—WRAP—is currently trialling separate collections with 17 local authorities to determine the feasibility of a wider rollout. WRAP and its partners are also running a campaign called Love Food, Hate Waste, whose aim overall is to reduce consumer food waste by 100,000 tonnes by March 2008. New targets are currently being drawn up to extend it. The noble Lord also asked about schemes in other countries and whether we regarded them as models to be copied. Research was carried out for Defra last year, which provided a comprehensive review of the literature on waste charging, and modelled the possible impacts of similar schemes in England. It is published on Defra’s website with a peer review report. I circulated a factual briefing to noble Lords last week, containing examples of how different types of schemes operate overseas, including weight-based, bin-volume and sack-based schemes. We would like to enable local authorities in England to trial these different methods as well, but waste in England is not necessarily collected in the same way as it is in other countries, which have a different demography and types of housing. Therefore, it is not right to say that one system abroad would be better for England—or for the pilots—than another. We will encourage authorities to introduce their own versions, similar to or different from those abroad, but which are well thought out. Obviously they can learn from practices. They can certainly learn from the PR and explanations involved in putting across such schemes to citizens, and not to be frightened by the ill informed, ignorant journalism on this issue that we sometimes get from certain sections of the tabloid press. That is important because these schemes work. We are not reinventing the wheel; it is not as though this does not happen successfully elsewhere, even within the European Union. That is why the pilots are so important; we want to test the issues. The noble Lord also asked which councils we are talking to. We are not talking at the moment. We have had discussions with local authorities, but there is no secret list in a drawer in Whitehall of councils that have been lined up to trial these schemes. That is the honest truth. We have not had authorities declaring themselves as potential candidates but we have had several informal conversations with authorities and other stakeholders who want further information. We are at a very early stage in the legislation. The Bill has come to this House first. It can change as it goes through the parliamentary process but we would not expect to receive formal applications until Parliament has concluded its consideration. Also, we cannot be sure that the authorities asking for information now will be the ones applying formally for the pilot. It is therefore not appropriate to give names of local authorities with which we have had informal discussions. We will develop a more formal process of application, so will look again at that issue for sure. In terms of judging the pilots, we will develop and publish a set of criteria to inform our decisions on which authorities should run them, which is likely to be based on how well the proposal delivers positive environmental and economic results, alongside protection for householders and the environment. That protection is crucial, as is revenue neutrality, so that householders do not feel that they are paying twice for the service. I have answered some of the points asked by the noble Earl. It is about household waste. The figures I used were given to me on one of my visits by Harper Adams college, which is looking at disposal sites and energy derived from wood waste. There is an issue of second-hand wood waste because it has resins, paints and glues, and comes under the waste directive governed by the Environment Agency on new use; the issue is not as easy as one thinks. But the idea of putting 6 million tonnes of wood into landfill is preposterous when we think of the energy that we can get from that in ways that are technically known. In the waste hierarchy, waste minimisation and recycling are higher than energy from waste. Not to create it in the first place is certainly higher in the Bill. In this respect, we focus on waste minimisation and recycling at the top of the hierarchy. As to the point that the noble Lord made about 20 per cent of the waste going to China, recycling is good for the environment wherever it takes place, as long as it is recycled and undertaken in an environmentally sound manner. I am well aware, from television, films and briefings, that that has not always been the case. It is illegal to export waste from this country for dumping, but all exports for recycling are subject to EC and UK controls in order to protect human health and the environment. People are sent out as inspectors to areas where the waste goes to recycling, not as a jolly, but to see that the environment is being protected as well as human health and that we are not causing problems. That has added advantages. Waste may go to economies that can use this waste—I know that is not a good word—for recycling on a more massive scale than we can do economically. That is not easy in a small country, where economies of scale apply. Where recycling can be done in growing economies such as China and India, they can reduce their reliance on natural resources in the first place, on a much greater scale than we could here. That would be of much greater benefit to the environment, so there is a win-win situation there—as long as the recycling is carried out in an environmentally friendly fashion. I have said that this is only a principled debate on Clause 51, as the noble Lord said. I apologise that it is not the full-blown exercise that was originally forecast, but I do not think it is trivial. This is relevant to the Bill. There is a connection between what we are trying to do on climate change and waste reduction, minimisation and recycling. This is a contribution that. If this is done by piloting, it is much more likely to win public acceptance in the medium and long term, than if it were done overnight through a system imposed by Whitehall.