New clause 32 - Moratorium on new municipal incinerators
Waste and Emissions Trading Bill [Lords]
5:51 pm
Mr Norman Baker (Lewes, Liberal Democrat)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for attempting to insert the word ''or''. As he will have noticed, it fits in nicely with amendments Nos. 4, 5 and 6 and is essential to their success. Without that word my amendment would be incomplete. I thank him for working together with me on that.
This group of amendments deals with incineration, and I suspect that, in many ways, most members of the Committee feel uncomfortable about where the Government are going. I have little confidence that the Government strategy, as set out at present, will limit incineration. I believe that it will lead to an inexorable rise in the number of incinerators across the country, which I, and most people in the Room, would wish to avoid.
Amendments Nos. 4, 5 and 6 seek to delete ''or energy recovery'' from subsection (3). My hon. Friend the Member for Guildford and I tabled them simply because we do not wish energy recovery to be put on the same level as the other listed alternatives—recycling, composting, biogas production, materials recovery and so on. The Government have a hierarchy, as we discussed before we adjourned for half an hour. The Minister said that the hierarchy need not be mentioned in the Bill. He said that it exists outside legislation. He said that there is a strategy. Yet when it comes to referring to alternatives, which he must do when he refers to a strategy, he does not explicitly put those within a hierarchy. They are lumped together.
The way that the Government strategy is unfolding and the way that the Bill will operate, both through the implementation of the landfill directive and the existence of the landfill tax, will make landfill the
least attractive option. I hope that the hon. Member for Stroud is interested in this point. He raised it on Second Reading and elsewhere, but I do not think that he is. I am quite happy that the Government have rightly taken action to put landfill firmly at the bottom of the waste hierarchy, but one must ask what steps the Government have taken to make waste minimisation the most attractive option, reuse the second most attractive option, recycling the third most attractive option, and incineration the least preferred option of the four.