New clause 32 - Moratorium on new municipal incinerators
Waste and Emissions Trading Bill [Lords]
8:55 am
Mr Gregory Barker (Bexhill and Battle, Conservative)
I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) and sympathise with several of his points. However, I did not follow why he could not support the new clauses tabled by the official Opposition and the Liberal party. I did not understand why he could not vote with us on this occasion for a moratorium on new municipal incinerators.
To summarise why we tabled the amendments, there is a signal lack of ambition in the Bill and that is a wasted opportunity. The Minister has made great play of the fact that the Bill is relatively narrowly focused—it does a specific job to do with landfill. I am sure that in its narrow focus it will be a good Bill, and all the better for having been considered by the Committee. However, the Bill lacks the drive, purpose and vision that are all too wanting in the Government's policy on the environment. As a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, I tell hon. Members that that is a recurring theme throughout the Government's approach to the environment.
That lack is not due to a lack of trying on the part of the Minister, who is widely respected for his views and commitment on the issue. However, his reputation does not speak for the Government. During the Committee's proceedings the Minister has pressed us to trust his assurances that he is in earnest when addressing the problems of the waste hierarchy. However, the sad reality is that the Minister is unable to commit the Government in a way that many hon. Members and others would like him to. Although I do not mean it as a personal criticism, a totem of the Government's lack of commitment to the green agenda is the fact that this able Minister is not a member of the Cabinet. [Hon. Members: ''Hear, hear.''] I have flattered and embarrassed him and I am sure that that will not do me any good. If the Government were convinced of the need to put the green agenda at the heart of policy, they would have a Minister with such convictions in the Cabinet, yet they do not. Although I am sure that the Secretary of State is a safe pair of hands, she is better known for her love of caravanning than for her commitment to reducing carbon emissions. That must change.
When the Secretary of State last gave evidence before the EAC, she chided me for my youth, which I can do nothing about, although it will change over time. She said something like, ''When you were just a lad, Mr. Barker, I was, blah, blah, blah, working the system back in the 1970s.'' However, she had a point: our differences might be a generational thing. My generation and younger generations are more ambitious and want to see a more holistic commitment to the environment, but the Bill signally fails to live up to those hopes and ambitions. They are addressed in new clause 32, which proposes a comprehensive response to the need for a new, firm, statute-based hierarchy for waste. We need to minimise, reduce, recycle and compost more—there is cross-party support for that view. The issue boils down to whether we are prepared to give such a regime real teeth, statutory backing and resources.
Although the Minister has detailed several good initiatives and has worked hard over the years to bring forth various measures, a thicket of individual initiatives is no substitute for a single, holistic, thought-through programme, and it is unfortunate that we still do not have that.
The Minister has talked about new technologies and the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) mentioned new types of gasification and pyrolysis and exciting new technologies. They could create a new generation of incineration projects that will go a long way to dispel a lot of widespread and well-founded public fears about incineration. The reality, however, is that the Bill does absolutely nothing to address the need for those technologies or to incentivise their manufacture. Nor was there anything in the Budget yesterday to address the need to bring on such initiatives.
In responding to points about the huge incinerator building programme, which will double large scale incinerator capacity over the next few years, the Minister implied that the new generation of incinerators comprised only micro-projects,
employing the very latest technology, but that is simply not the case. His own parliamentary answers show that the incinerators on the list would handle about 220,000 tonnes a year on average, resulting in increased capacity of 2.7 million tonnes a year. These are not small, community-based, cutting-edge technology plants; they are big, old-fashioned, large scale incinerators.
That is the situation in my constituency, and I have the same concerns and address the same problems as does the hon. Member for Lewes. The problem is that we must not only take people's rubbish from a long way away, but commit to doing so for up to 20 years, because of private finance initiative rules. Long after people in East Sussex will, we hope, have grasped the recycling and reuse nettle, there will still be a huge, insatiable demand for rubbish to burn in these huge plants. It may have to come from Kent, Surrey and London, and even from across the channel.
The Bill sends out the signal that we are starting to address the landfill issue, but that we are not prepared to do anything meaningful about the huge long-term threat of incineration. The 20-year contracts for huge plants make the issue urgent. We cannot wait for a review with no date attached to it or for the Treasury to get around to thinking about this; we need action now. New clause 32 gives us an opportunity to address the problem—here, today, in this sitting.
Nothing in the new clause should trouble anyone who is serious about the environment and who has thought through the problems of incineration; nothing in it should prompt profound concerns. It may not be perfect; indeed, I can vouch for the fact that it may not be, because I had a hand in drafting it. However, it is the best measure available. If the Government do not support it, perhaps they will support the relevant Liberal Democrat new clause.
There are two issues at the heart of new clause 32. One is the hierarchy—ensuring that everything that can be recycled or reused is removed from the waste stream before it goes to incineration. The other relates to fiscal measures; they are the most pressing issue and the most glaring omission from the Bill. The Bill will displace waste from landfill to incineration. The Minister can protest as much as he likes, but he is a lone voice on this issue. I doubt that a single major, credible witness in the environmental field would stand up and say that there will be no economic displacement from landfill to incineration as long as the Treasury fails to introduce new measures to address the economic imbalance.
It was, I think, the hon. Member for Stafford who took me to task for referring simply to fiscal measures, but I did so deliberately. I am not prescribing whether they should involve a tax, tax relief, a tax subsidy, a grant or an incentive, but we must address the fact that the new technology is making incineration cheaper, while landfill is becoming more expensive. Like flood waters, waste will not disappear. Putting a barrier on landfill will simply redirect a growing amount of waste towards incineration.