Environmental Protection and Green Growth

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for that contribution. I agree that it is very important that these companies now look through the whole of their manufacturing processes. I will deal with the role of waste in a moment. In July this year, the Aldersgate Group, a collection of charities with large companies such as BT, PepsiCo and Microsoft, commissioned a report that provided an independent analysis of the impact assessment produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on mandatory carbon reporting. Taking just one of the options—option 3—Aldersgate found that DEFRA had overestimated the total costs by up to £4.6 billion and underestimated the benefits by £980 million. It said that DEFRA's impact assessment had ignored wider behavioural change, product and service innovation and other strategic advantages from carbon reporting. It also states that DEFRA underestimates the benefits to companies over time, because the DEFRA model assumes that once companies have reduced their emissions in year one, they will not reduce them again over the following nine years. As my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (David Wright) said, large companies such as Ricoh and Tata get very good consultants in every year to see how they can drive down their costs and environmental impact.