Climate Change Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 183H: 183H: Schedule 5, page 56, line 15, leave out ““and”” The noble Lord said: This is quite an important group of amendments because they relate to the conditions that will have to be met before a local authority can set up a pilot scheme. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said earlier that the Government would be looking at the criteria for judging bids, so it may be that some of these matters will be considered as part of those criteria. It will be interesting to hear what the Minister has to say about this. A number of conditions are set out in the Bill, one of which states that there has to be an anti fly-tipping strategy, something that all collection authorities should have anyway. Amendment No. 183J would insert the word ““successful”” to lay it down that the authority had to have a track record of successful action against fly-tipping. Every local authority nowadays has strategies standing several feet high, but it does not mean that they are successful or even carried out at all. I am grateful to the noble Lord for his Written Answer given on 16 January to a Question for Written Answer, No. 1130, that I tabled. It has given me a lot of information about what the Government would consider to be a successful fly-tipping strategy, and I shall therefore say a lot less about it now than I might otherwise have done. Amendment No. 183K is about packaging and echoes the point made earlier by the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, about going back to the commercial source of some of the waste. The amendment suggests that, if you are going to target householders and potentially penalise them financially if they do not improve their behaviour in terms of the amount of residual waste that they throw out, fairness dictates that you should tackle one of the two main components of domestic waste, which is packaging waste of all kinds. The amendment provides that local authorities should have a strategy with the main local retailers to reduce the volume of packaging produced. This ought to be happening anyway, and it would have been a better subject for legislation than the one we are looking at now, so I suggest that looking at retailers should take place as well. I turn to another highly relevant issue. I have a copy of the new and excitingly titled London Local Authorities (Shopping Bags) Bill, which seeks to reduce the number of use-once shopping bags in London. I think that it has been presented to Parliament and will be looked at in the appropriate way in the House. It has a great deal of good sense in it, and I wonder whether the Minister can confirm that this is the sort of practical thing that the Government might give a fair wind to when it comes before us. I will not say more about it now because I will have a chance to do that later. Amendment No. 183L refers to kitchen waste, the other main component of residual waste that has to be reduced if the total amount of residual waste is to be substantially reduced. Kitchen waste is a major factor in hampering authorities that want to separate waste after they collect it rather than having kerb-side separation. If lots of kitchen waste is commingled—the word used earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell—it contaminates everything else. Even cans, which might otherwise be collected easily, are difficult to separate. Home composting ought to be encouraged much more than it is, but you can only compost some kitchen waste, not all of it. Bread and things like that can be composted, but not bones and all the meat that people throw away nowadays. The amendment suggests that as a sine qua non for having a system that penalises people for throwing out non-recyclable, residual waste, there ought to be a local system of collecting kitchen waste. A number of local authorities do this very efficiently, and many others would like to but cannot because they cannot afford to set the system up. If the Government want to encourage local authorities to substantially reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfill, that is the absolute top priority. I should also say that this kind of waste causes the methane that makes up 3 per cent of greenhouse gases. If the Government are really serious about reducing the impact of domestic waste on global warming, they will tackle kitchen waste as the top priority and not propose this rather tin pot scheme. Finally, Amendment 183N probes the powers to amend the provisions that the Government are seeking here to see how wide they are and what is meant by them. I beg to move.