I rise to move Amendment 62A and will speak more generally to oppose the clause—indeed, the first part of the amendment has exactly that effect, as it would delete the clause.
Earlier this afternoon we had a pretty lively debate demonstrating why parking enforcement is best left to local authorities. It is a pretty fundamental rule among any councillors who have any experience in local government that you do not mess around with refuse collection or waste collection within a year of an election. Any councillor, particularly any councillor who has served for any time, would tell you: never mess with refuse collection within a year of an election, yet here we have a clause in which the Government are seeking fundamentally to interfere with refuse collection within a few months of a general election. My mission this afternoon is to save the Government from themselves, and I hope the Minister will feel able to help me with this.
The first question I have to ask is: why are the Government doing this? Local authorities generally have a pretty good record, not just on refuse collection but particularly on recycling. There is a long way to go but the rate has increased to 43%, I think, which is very near to quadrupling in the past decade. Perhaps there will be an incentive with the landfill tax, but the amount of waste going to landfill has reduced by 70% in the past decade. Yes, more needs to be done but it is not a bad record to start with, so there is no problem there.
There is no evidence as far as I am aware that local authorities, either genuinely or particularly, have been acting disproportionately in the way in which they enforce their collection regimes. If there is evidence of that, I am sure the Minister will give it to us, but I would still need to know that that evidence is so overwhelming and strong that it requires legislation from central government to interfere in this service. If you ask most residents what they pay their council tax for, after their initial rude remarks, the one thing that most residents everywhere say is that they pay their council taxes for their refuse collection. That is one of the few services these days that local authorities have to provide to all residents, so where is the evidence?
The Government consulted on these proposals and I hope the Minister will confirm that most of the responses to the consultation said, in effect, “Leave it alone and do not decriminalise this”, so where is the evidence? Why are the Government taking the frankly rather risky and unnecessary step of interfering in local authorities’ business for waste collection?
The effect of the clause will remove the power of local authorities to prescribe their refuse collections arrangements. It will reduce the fine for an offence from the current £1,000, which is a penalty few wish to incur, to a civil penalty of £60. I return to our earlier discussion about parking, when I said that the penalty imposed was nowhere near the same sort of deterrent. As a former leader of a council that had an extremely good record on recycling I must say straightaway that I strongly prefer incentives to threats. My local authority never had to use those threats. But those threats are necessary as a deterrent.
Why do the Government want to do this? I referred to the proposals on parking as something more suited to Friday night in the pub. I suggest that this, too, properly belongs in a pub on a Friday night—from a Daily Mail reader rather than from anyone who actually has any knowledge of refuse collection services and of the drive to increase recycling rates. It probably belongs in the pub on a Friday night, not in a Bill brought forward by my Government and still less in a Bill brought forward by my Government within months of facing a general election.
This measure is in a Deregulation Bill. It does not deregulate: it removes a system that seems to be working reasonably well—I have not seen the evidence that is not working reasonably well—and substitutes that for a far more difficult and complex situation that nobody is going to understand. It is going to cost local authorities a great deal more to implement and enforce. I simply do not know why the Government want to do this.
If the Government press ahead with this—I hope that we will all be able to persuade them to think again—the Local Government Association believes that if it has to happen the current level of fine of £1,000 should be reduced to a level 1 fine of £200. I would prefer us to leave things as they are. I believe that they are working well and all the evidence suggests that they are working well. Most importantly of all, waste collection arrangements are the business of local authorities and not the business of central government. I beg to move.