Climate Change Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 183C: 183C: Schedule 5, page 56, line 3, leave out ““may”” and insert ““must”” The noble Lord said: I shall speak also to the other amendments in the group in my name, Amendments Nos. 183D, 183ZA and 183ZB. We are now firmly into Schedule 5. This group of amendments covers the questions of the areas to be covered by the pilots, the number of pilots, and how representative the pilots will be. Amendments Nos. 183C and 183D, which go together, would take out of the Bill the provision that the pilots, "““may cover the whole or any part of the area of a waste collection authority””," and replace it with, "““must cover the whole of the area of a waste collection authority””." The Minister briefly mentioned this provision in previous debates. It is not clear why a useful and sensible pilot would cover only part of a local authority. The Minister said previously that that the reason was to give an authority the flexibility to decide for itself. But, throughout this part of the Bill, there are issues of equity and fairness. The purpose of the amendment is to probe how such schemes might work. Some residents in a particular collection authority area would be covered by such schemes, but some would not. People in some places may have to buy bags at 20p or £1 a bag—whatever it is—but in other areas they would not. For those who have to buy them—who to pay up front for a service that others are getting free—issues of equity and fairness will arise. The same applies for those who have to pay more for a bigger bin, a more frequent collection, or whatever. People will believe that it is not fair that others within the same council are being treated differently. The Minister may say that it is up to the council to cope with that but there is an issue of principle here which the Government have to address. Amendment No. 183ZA deals with the number of pilots. I must say that the numbering of the amendments in this part of the Bill is a nightmare, but no doubt we will all cope. Amendment No. 183ZA is also for probing purposes. It would leave out the line that says that there can be only five pilots. The obvious question is: why five? Why not six, 10 or 50? What is the justification for five? One guess would be that someone has worked out that £100,000 is the amount that will have to be paid to a local authority to take part in the pilot, and that £1.5 million divided by five authorities over three years comes—if I have understood it right—to £100,000 a year. If that was the only sum that Defra could get out of the Government for this, there could be only five pilots. The question of the number of pilots is also linked to Amendment No. 183ZB, which inserts into the Bill new wording to insist that the areas covered by the pilots should be representative. The amendment states: "““The choice of pilot areas shall be made so as to include a representative selection of types of properties and households, urban, suburban and rural areas, and other social and economic conditions””." That is a slightly more detailed version of the Conservatives’ amendment in this group. It seems self-evident that the more pilots we have, the greater will be the variety of areas that can be tested. Think of the types of area that could be included. There are far-flung rural areas: uplands, farms and hamlets. There are more compact rural areas with larger villages, and those could be very different in the lowlands. There are large council estates, some with blocks of flats and others with low-rise garden houses. There are new towns. There are inner cities with private flats, council flats, housing associations, town houses, and mixtures of shops and housing of the kind that the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy, mentioned. There are garden suburbs. There are Pennine towns and villages in areas such as the one where I live, with higgledy-piggledy terraces and cottages. There is the question of students and of houses in multiple occupation generally, and probably lots of others that I have not thought of. There are many different sorts of area. If this is going to be rolled out to 60 or 65 per cent of areas across the country, those areas will have to be part of a pilot. One wonders whether that can be done with only five pilots. The Government say that there are four types of scheme: the big bins and little bins, the chip and bin, the frequency-based, and the pound-a-throw schemes—or give them their official names if you like. If you have four types of scheme and nine or 10 types of area, it makes you wonder how five pilots will be enough. It may be that you cannot get more than five councils to volunteer, but that is a different matter. Nevertheless, if it is going to be piloted properly, it has to be piloted in lots of different sorts of area. The fear—it is a very genuine fear—is that it will be piloted in easy areas. It is easy to see how a wheelie-bin based scheme can work in a practical way in suburban areas where there are gardens, every house has its own entrance and it is easy to identify the bin for that house. It is easy to see how it can work in that sort of area, whether it is right or wrong. It is not easy to see how it will work in a lot of other areas. Unless the Government pilot in a sufficient range of different areas, a very substantial rollout is probably impractical, and if it were enforced, would probably not be a good idea. So will the pilots give a full and true picture? The question probed in the amendment is whether five pilots are enough. What guarantees can the Government give that the areas will be representative? I beg to move.