Climate Change Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 183PA: 183PA: Schedule 5, page 56, line 38, leave out from beginning to end of line 8 on page 57 The noble Lord said: This is clearly a probing amendment. It would take out a great chunk of the Bill. I am not seriously proposing to do that, but the amendment gives us an opportunity to have some discussion over the way that volume-based schemes might work. As I understand it, the two types of volume-based schemes being considered are different sizes of bins—big bins and little bins—or charging people per sack. I am not clear about whether charging people per sack will always be on the basis of selling people the sack, which they are allowed to fill up and put out, and therefore the number put out will depend on how many sacks people have bought, or whether people will have a variable number of sacks and the charge will be on the basis of how many they put out at any given time and therefore they will have to be counted as the collection takes place, in the same sort of way that counting will take place on weight-based schemes. Some clarification might be helpful. It would be easy for people to order a little bin when they need a big bin. It seems that there will be a great incentive for people to say that they will make do with a little bin but it will not cater for their needs and then there will be the problems of what they have to do with the waste that is left over and the sort of problems that in many areas will occur with weight-based schemes: people will either put them in someone else’s bin, which if people have already paid for that bin might not be a huge problem, but again will lead to neighbour disputes, or alternatively they will get rid of it in some other way and put it in the backyard of an empty house or on a piece of waste land. We are having an increasing problem of people putting black bags in ordinary litter bins. The council in its wisdom thought that having a big increase in the number of litter bins was a wonderful idea to help keep the place tidy, but people are stuffing their black bags into litter bins. If they are clever and do not put incriminating material in; that is, material that identifies the people doing it, it is difficult to stop them. There are many associated problems. The Minister will say that that is what pilots are for, but it is right that we should consider some of the problems before they happen, not least because it may be the last ever time that we can do that. From all the material that the Government have produced I have no feeling for how much they think sacks might be sold for. Are we talking of a minimal level, such as 10 pence, or are we talking of a significant level, like the Maastricht example, which is one of the success stories that the Government are talking about, where they are 75 pence—a euro—at the moment? If they are ordinary plastic sacks and they are identified only by having words or a logo on them I can see people doing well with a black market in them. I can see that growing up quickly and the whole system will break down. I look forward to what the Minister has to say about the way in which volume-based schemes might work. I beg to move.