As always, it is a great pleasure to follow my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. I do not always agree with her, but she speaks a great deal of common sense—as well as a few other things. I am delighted to see her putting on a mask. She will be glad to know that I took my blue mask off—I am waiting for the one from the haberdasher’s.
The noble Baroness made a very good point about asbestos, but of course that is a specific substance. “Plastic” is a bit of a generic term that covers a great deal. We have to recognise that in its beginning it often brought hygiene where there was squalor and safe packaging where there was danger, but it has now got completely out of hand. No one could have watched programmes like “The Blue Planet” without being completely nauseated by some of the scenes we saw on our screens of animals choked or strangled to death. It causes an enormous problem even in our own countryside and in our towns and cities.
My noble friend Lord Caithness referred to litter. In many ways, litter is the curse of the age. I have been horrified when I have watched “Look North” on our local television station and seen that after the end of various phases of the lockdown people have gone out in their hundreds and thousands and desecrated, and defecated in, our countryside. I say to the Minister that it is crucial, as others have referred to, that we have targets and deadlines. The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, made a particular point of that and she is right. We keep coming back to the phrase “a landmark Bill” but if this is indeed going to be a landmark Bill then there have to be deadlines for elimination. Of course one has to give manufacturers a degree of notice but we cannot carry on as we are or we will smother ourselves in our own detritus—it is as simple and alarming as that.
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This debate has also brought out one of the deficiencies in our current parliamentary practice as a Hybrid House. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, is sitting here. She has been referred to several times in complimentary terms, and deservedly so, but in a normal Committee in your Lordships’ House any one of your Lordships is able to get up and make a contribution during the debate. I make no specific criticism of anyone in particular because these methods of working were evolved with great skill, but to have to work to a prescribed list rules out both spontaneity and the opportunity for people to contribute who may
well be sitting here with a real contribution to make, but cannot do so. I hope that when we come back on 6 September and we are debating properly, the normal Committee procedures will return so that people can get up as and when they please, or as and when they are challenged to do so. I cannot ask the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, a question now because if I did then I would be out of order and if she answered it then she would be out of order. Frankly, that is farcical.
I have one other point. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, who introduced this debate extremely well, refers in her amendment to EU directive 94/62/EC. I ask my noble friend for confirmation that none of the standards applying in this country after the enactment of the Bill will be in any way inferior to the EU directives under which we have been operating hitherto. If we are going to be global Britain with high standards, those standards must be in no way inferior to what we have been applying hitherto. We have to improve, and we cannot do so by going backwards.