Clause 18
Finance Bill
12:00 pm
Jeremy Browne (Taunton, Liberal Democrat)
I shall make a brief contribution in which I will shamelessly refer to my constituency, but it is of wider interest because Somerset has the highest rate of recycling in the country—a fact of which we are proud, because it represents the strong attachment that people who live in the county have to good environmental practice. We are keen to do better. On Friday last week, I was fortunate enough to be accompanied by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg) when visiting the Priorswood recycling centre on the edge of Taunton. He was able to see what I have seen on many occasions since I opened it in 2005, which is the wide range of facilities it has to process plastic, different forms of glass, paper and metal. [Interruption.] I hear, out of the corner of my ear, an unnecessary political intervention. It must also be said that I noticed a very large number of Conservative election leaflets being pulped. It did not look as though they had even been read, which was a cause of distress to me, because I always think that the greater the number of people who read Conservative leaflets in my constituency, the better the Liberal Democrats will do. However, people seem to have discarded those leaflets without even taking that precaution.