My Lords, in moving Amendment 5 I will also speak to Amendments 28, 30, 50, 115 and 125, which are in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Fox. I am very aware of the time and the risk of a vote being called, so I am abbreviating this on the understanding that we may be able to have discussions later.
In the interests of time I did not speak on the first group, but the noble Lord, Lord Fox, spoke about this Bill—rather than being a framework Bill or one that is filled with Henry VIII powers—as providing guard-rails. Many will see the amendments in this group as providing a set of environmental guard-rails. The noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, said that the Bill needed policy direction, and that is essentially what these amendments do.
I take the Minister’s point about there being a level of detail that is not appropriate to include in legislation rather than regulation. I spent this morning with Westminster Forum Projects talking about deposit return schemes and extended producer responsibility. I learned about RAM—recyclability assessment methodology. Those are things that certainly need to be in the regulations, but they need to be the guard-rails here.
These amendments will be classed as environmental amendments, but they are also amendments about things such as the right to repair and tackling utterly unnecessary planned obsolescence, which is deeply costly to consumers. These are also amendments that start to address the cost of living crisis and are real principles for people today. I was going to go through the amendments in considerable detail, but the arguments for right to repair and against planned obsolescence are really obvious so, given the time, I will address just the circular economy elements, which run as a line through these amendments.
It is worth saying that the environmental improvement plan contains a target to reduce residual waste, excluding construction waste, to 437 kilogrammes per capita by 2028, but in 2022 this figure stood at 558.8 kilogrammes. That was only 2.8% down on 2019. In three years, that was all the progress that had been made towards the target of circularity, which is only three years away.
The noble Lord, Lord Frost, who is no longer in his place, was talking about EU rules on deforestation. In 2021, UK consumption was associated with 30,000
hectares of deforestation, with all the climate and nature impacts that we understand. If we look at the climate aspect, the treatment and disposal of waste resources is separately responsible for 5% of all UK greenhouse gas emissions. The cost of that treatment and disposal of waste is borne very often by the public, when actually a few companies are profiting from the production.
I briefly mention, because I promised to do so, that the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, who is unable to be with us for this group, wanted to stress the importance of construction. Although it is excluded from that waste target, there are difficulties because so many problems with, and failures of, design are happening in construction. We all know about the safety impacts but they also have huge environmental impacts—and cost impacts, about which many of us know from working with builders.
In the interests of time, I shall stop there. I beg to move Amendment 5.