Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test, Labour)

I beg to move amendment No. 71, in

clause 31, page 20, line 18, at end insert—

'(1A) In section 45 (collection of controlled waste), subsection (3) (charges) shall be omitted.'.

A little while ago, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings mentioned his interest in Marx, so I am sure that he will be familiar with the tootsie-frootsie ice-cream sketch in the Marx brothers film ''A Day at the Races'', in which Groucho Marx has to buy many different form books to find out which horse will win the race that he has a tip on. Amendment No. 71 is something like that, in that it is necessary to go through several documents to understand what it is about. It refers to the Environmental Protection Act 1990, to the Bill and then back to the amendment paper.

In essence, the amendment is simple and modest. It would switch off a section in the 1990 Act that specifically prohibits local authorities charging to collect household waste. That provision was based on the logic that the householder could put as much waste as they liked outside their front door and, because they paid their poll tax or council tax, the local authority would be required to collect it. At that stage, there was no consideration of a waste hierarchy or minimisation, so the quantity of waste that the householder placed outside their door was not an issue.

We are talking in a rather different vein today. We are debating how waste collection authorities could deliver waste to disposal authorities in a form suitable for recycling, and we have talked several times about what we might call the holy grail of waste hierarchy—the idea of waste minimisation. The important point about the present situation under the 1990 Act is that the waste collection authority has little leverage, other than exhortation, in delivering waste in a form that the waste disposal authority may work on.

The suggestion made by the amendment is that by simply switching off the relevant section, the local authority could have available to it—if it wanted and

after a debate with its local citizens—the leverage to enable it to undertake its part of the bargain contained in the provisions of the Bill. The amendment says that if we are following the Bill's logic, it is also logical for the local authority to have the wherewithal to enable it to take a part in the process set out in the Bill. It would provide a rights-and-responsibilities arrangement for waste collection and waste disposal authorities.

The point about switching off the relevant provision in the EPA is not that a local authority would be forced to charge an amount of money in addition to what was set out in the council tax bill. The point is that a prohibition on any method, however imaginative, of variable charging, rebate charging or incentives for minimisation appears to lie in the EPA as it stands. Switching off that provision would allow a local authority to undertake those imaginative ways of encouraging people to put their waste out so that it could be processed, or to put less waste out in the first place. That would be the logical consequence.

There are a number of practical examples of how the process works, not in this country but elsewhere in Europe. In Milan, there was an arrangement that involved a fixed charge for collecting waste overall, but a variable charge on residual—non-biodegradable—waste. That produced an immediate 18 per cent. reduction in the amount of residual waste put out. In Sweden, a similar arrangement produced a much larger reduction of 45 per cent. That system appears to have a real empirical impact; it works.

There are potential political problems, inasmuch as if one simply charged everyone double for collecting waste, that would be seen as an additional tax on waste collection. As we have discussed in relation to incineration, the relationship that a local authority has with its population means that it is unlikely that such an arrangement could come into play at local level. However, a system of variable charging, with incentives such as a rebate if someone produced a smaller amount of waste or if their waste was fully sorted, could be popular at local level, provided it was well explained and understood. Such a system would have a marked effect. It would complete the circle of arrangements that we have discussed today and at other times. I am talking about how we make the system work fully in terms of trading, delivery of waste and the relationship between waste collection and waste disposal authorities.

To save on any suspense, let me say that I anticipate that the amendment will be received with interest, but not necessarily acclaim, so I shall not press it to a vote. However, I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to indicate whether he thinks that something along these lines might be a way of completing the circle, whether further work should be done on considering how that might work and whether, in relation to the Bill in operation, it may be a good idea to look again at the EPA and the assumptions behind it on waste collection.

See this speech in context