Jeremy Browne (Taunton, Liberal Democrat)

Thank you for your guidance, Mr. Atkinson.

I was not thinking about Cornish nationalism when I was at the Priorswood recycling centre, because I was so full of admiration for the facilities there. I was being shown around the facilities with the leader of my party. Quite a few of the people who work there and who were giving us the tour stressed the benefits, as they saw them, of the landfill tax in terms of incentivising local authorities and other organisations to recycle more.

We are not resting on our laurels. Of course, we in Somerset have the very good fortune of having a county council that is run by the Liberal Democrats, which means that environmental consciousness is right at the forefront of all its deliberations. We also have the good fortune of having the Liberal Democrats as the largest party on Taunton Dean borough council. As a resident of Taunton, I am very pleased to see the benefits of much more recycling being done at doorstep level.

I have read a lot in the national newspapers on the controversy about less frequent waste collection. However, landfill taxes and other incentives that are being put into practice by local authorities are having a dramatic impact on levels of recycling. Certainly I hear very few complaints in my area that the rubbish is only collected fortnightly, just as long as there is plenty of opportunity for collection of recyclable items. For example, newspapers and bottles are collected weekly from households in my constituency, and now plastic items, including those big, unwieldy milk containers that sometimes carry up to six pints and large containers of orange squash, are being collected from doorsteps along with cardboard. When people buy a new implement or appliance, for example, and they do not wish to throw the cardboard box away but regard it as unnecessarily burdensome to take it to the Priorswood recycling centre or to the other recycling centre in my constituency, which is in Poole,  just outside Wellington, they find it frustrating if it is not collected. Even right down to cereal boxes, for example, people are having the opportunity to recycle those types of daily household items.

In conclusion, it is worth saying that it is rare indeed to find people who are keen to speak out in favour of higher taxation, particularly when the burden may fall on them, but what is quite interesting is that both the population and the people who are responsible for waste management and disposal in my constituency see the merit in having a landfill tax incentive to increase recycling. I invite everybody on the Committee who has not seen the future, in terms of recycling in our country and in terms of just how progressive and enlightened that we can be as a population, to visit Taunton Dean and Somerset, where we are rightly proud of our good record in that regard. No doubt we will do better still after we get beyond Thursday and we can come up with further imaginative schemes to improve the environment in my area.

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