New clause 32 - Moratorium on new municipal incinerators
Waste and Emissions Trading Bill [Lords]
10:45 am
Mr Michael Meacher (Minister of State (the Environment), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Oldham West and Royton, Labour)
One needs to choose one's metaphors carefully when talking about landfill, but we are making a mountain out of a molehill. We all agree that we want to ensure the fastest and most extensive increase in recycling, reuse and recovery that we can. We are talking about the power of the disposal authority to give an instruction to the collection authority to ensure that waste is separated, the associated arrangements for ensuring that that happens and the power of direction to deal with the financial consequences.
The new clause specifies that material should be sent not to landfill but to be recycled. That is a quasi-moratorium on landfill, similar to the moratorium on incineration that we were discussing earlier. Telling people that, under no circumstances, are they allowed to landfill is not the most appropriate way of dealing with the problem. I sympathise with the view that we should not straitjacket local authorities; they are responsible to their electorates and should be given a measure of discretion.
We seek to limit the parameters within which local authorities can exercise that discretion, but to instruct them that, in no circumstances whatsoever, can they landfill waste that could properly be recycled smacks of a command-and-control system. Perhaps we Members are changing places because I am not sure that I would have said that 20 years ago. The approach in the new clause is unnecessarily authoritarian. The hon. Gentleman will achieve the same result within the more flexible system that we propose, because a package of measures and incentives are embedded in the Bill.