Schedule 5
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
Steve Webb (Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
I look forward to hearing what the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border has to say about the amendments that he tabled, when he has had chance to work it out. This group of amendments is different from that which we debated previously because, since our sitting on Thursday, two more measures have been added: amendment No. 110, which we tabled, and new clause 22. For the benefit of members of the Committee who might not have had chance to look at amendment No. 110, it questions the decision to restrict the number of pilots under clause 70(2).
Our approach is to allow 1,000 flowers to bloom, not five. There are big variations among local authorities. Urban, rural, and multi-tier authorities have different waste streams and structures for dealing with waste. In light of that, there is a huge amount of learning to be done. While I would not dream of accusing the Department of doing this, the present Prime Minister has a tendency to want to control things. Although, in one sense, the provision is enabling and saying, “Let there be pilots,” there must always be a “but” at the end, which is that we can have only five pilots. That is unnecessary.
The Bill refers to five pilots, so if the Government invited proposals for pilots and received 10 good ideas, they would be obliged to throw away five of them because, under statute, they will not be allowed to have more than five pilots. If the Government think that five pilots are all they can cope with, they are perfectly at liberty to decide to do that after receiving submissions, but to pre-empt looking at the pilots before they have even seen them is wrong, which is why my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham and I want to remove the stipulation.
Amendment No. 108 would exclude from participation in the pilots authorities that do not undertake weekly collections. As we said on Thursday, some schemes could be pure incentive schemes; in other words, some pilots need not be penal. Given that, at worst, they must be revenue-neutral, they could be net beneficial. Authorities, for whatever reason, that do not have weekly collections—that might be popular or accepted locally—should not be precluded from taking part in pilots whereby they could offer incentives to their residents to improve recycling. There is a valid debate to be had on weekly or fortnightly collections and whatever is appropriate in a particular area, but to preclude whole categories of authorities from running pilots because they opted in their particular circumstances not to have weekly collections seems unduly restrictive. We do not therefore support amendment No. 108.
We have a lot of sympathy with what amendment No. 109 is trying to do, but it is over-prescriptive. It refers to polystyrene and Tetrapak, for example, but we could find ourselves constantly amending legislation to cover new materials. We could certainly have central Government guidance and initiatives, but if we list specific individual materials—“metal and aluminium” itself is an interesting phrase—we would start to see some of the problems in identification. At the moment, we think that amendment No. 109 is somewhat over-specific.
New clause 18, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle on Thursday, relates to giving authorities the opportunity to cut council tax by means of an incentive mechanism. In principle, we have no problem with that. We are perfectly happy for local authorities to have that freedom. It was not apparent to us that they could not do that anyway under the Bill. If it is necessary to be explicit, we do not have a problem with that. However, we would probably need further legislation to make it happen. For example, imagine a council tenant on benefit who is on 100 per cent. council tax benefit. My understanding is that they do not pay the council tax and get the money back from the Government—they just never pay it. Therefore, if we wanted to incentivise people who do not pay council tax at all to cut their waste, it would be odd if their council tax was reduced and they got council tax benefit in excess of the council tax that they were paying. That would probably be illegal. Such an amendment would have knock-on effects, but, in principle, we do not have a problem with it.
Finally, we would be interested to hear what is meant by new clause 22, which has not yet been spoken to. It would probably be unhelpful for me to start guessing what it means, so I will draw my remarks to a close, but I might comment on that new clause once we have heard what it is meant to achieve.