Climate Change Bill [HL]

The noble Lord has raised an issue relating to the ways in which local authorities might be able to charge. I want to reinforce—at the price of repetition, but it is absolutely the case—that the money raised in charges would be used to pay back rebates to residents. We want to be are able to pilot a wide variety of schemes. Paragraph 4 allows authorities to run schemes where people might buy sacks or pay more for bigger bins. The schemes would encourage householders to reduce the volume of the waste they throw away as opposed to recycling. Similar receptacle-based schemes are operating successfully overseas, both in Europe and in the United States. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, mentioned the sack-based scheme in Maastricht, where there was a phenomenal increase in waste separated for recycling, from 45 per cent up to 65 per cent. We want to give authorities the freedom to trial these sorts of schemes here. Paragraph 5 allows authorities to charge in relation to the amount of waste produced. This could be done by weighing or measuring the volume of waste, for example. As set out in the consultation paper, we would also like the legislation to allow for charging according to how often residents have their waste collected. We would like authorities to have the power to charge in relation to tags—which answers the noble Lord’s question about the sacks—which would need to be attached to sacks of waste. So there are a number of options here, and during the Bill’s passage, although I cannot say in this House, we may bring forward amendments to clarify the situation. Amendment 183PA would remove paragraph 4—a blockbuster option—and therefore the option for schemes to charge in relation to waste receptacles, bins or sacks. As I have explained, we think that the option is necessary. It gives powers to authorities to run the schemes, which have a proven track record overseas. I am not a world traveller, but overseas cities and rural areas are not too dissimilar to ours, particularly in the European Union. The noble Lord referred to schemes that are operating with bins for food waste and green waste up and down the country, quite successfully to the best of my knowledge. Local authorities are involved. I do not know how many authorities are involved in food waste collection, for example, but we are piloting quite expensive schemes—running to several millions of pounds—around the country using small-scale anaerobic digesters fed by kitchen waste and green waste collected by the local authority. They are very much experimental but such experiments need a few million pounds of capital investment. Work is under way, but it is up to the local authorities. I do not want to pre-empt—nor should we try to do so—what aspect of it the local authority seeks to charge for in respect of getting a buy-in from its residents so that it can organise rebates and charges. That will be different in different areas, which is the beauty of the pilots.