Clause 1 - Target years
Waste and Emissions Trading Bill [Lords]
10:00 am
Mr Norman Baker (Lewes, Liberal Democrat)
I hope that the Minister will assure us of that. However, like other hon. Members, I am aware of the pressures on legislation and the time that the Leader of the House allocates, and I am not very confident that we shall see further waste legislation in the foreseeable future. Nobody would cheer more than me to hear the Minister say that whoever the Leader of the House is these days has assured him on the matter,
and I should be happy to give way to him if he can do so.
In the absence of that intervention, I pursue the second reason why the Minister was not happy with the amendment. He said that plastics were not biodegradable—he was picked up on that point—and so were outside the Bill. Even if plastics were biodegradable, that would not mean that they would have to be outside the Bill. Plastics are waste and the Bill is about waste, so the Minister's argument is not terribly convincing.
Thirdly, the Minister said that the amendment would not work. Clause 2(1) says ''maximum amount by weight''. On its own, that provision does not work. It works only because elsewhere the Bill explains what weight means and how that is incorporated into other measures and the Government's thoughts. On that basis, adding ''and volume'' would work, and I would be happy to promise the Minister that if he accepts the amendment, I shall be sure to incorporate an amendment later in the Bill to ensure that the amendment would work. I am not convinced that we should be much governed by the Minister's strategic argument.
More serious are the environmental consequences that will result from the Government's going down the road that the EU has chosen, which is weight-based. The Government must incorporate targets by weight, but not necessarily exclusively by weight. What are the environmental consequences of that? There could be pressure to reduce the use of heavy materials, in particular glass. One of the market outcomes of the measure might be further movement from glass bottles to plastic bottles. Do we want that? One could argue, for example, that plastic bottles are lighter to transport than glass bottles, which might be a plus. However, we know about the difficulties in recycling or incinerating plastic, and the noxious fumes that are given off. Therefore, I am not convinced that the environment gains if plastic replaces glass, and suspect that what I described might be one of the outcomes.
What signal does the measure give to the packaging industry? The packaging industry recognises that the Government are loading their cart with a measure about weight that does not mention volume. The Minister talked about the packaging directive, which will go some way towards dealing with the plastic situation if the target is raised as he says it will be. I will be pleased if it is. However, that directive deals only with recycling. It does not minimise the production in the first place, and the Minister indicated that he wanted to go down the route of waste minimisation. The packaging directive is therefore no answer to the fundamental problem of the generation of waste in the first place.
When the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire said that the volume of waste was the major problem, the Minister picked him up and said that it was the creation of waste. However, the packaging directive does nothing to deal with that. Fiscal measures need to be implemented to prevent waste generation in the first place, but they are absent.