Environment Bill

Debate between Baroness Jenkin of Kennington and Baroness Garden of Frognal

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, my Twitter bio starts:

“Hates waste of all kind”,


and so I do. Whether time and money or other forms of waste, such as energy, water and food waste—matters we are discussing today—“conserve” is my watchword. For those speaking from the Conservative Benches today, there should be a clue in our name.

Not only do I run around my home switching the thermostat down and the radiators and lights off, I do as much as I can in this crumbling old building, turning the lights off, but sadly the radiators are still controlled centrally, so I am unable to turn them off or down, despite the heat inside and outside and the fact that the windows are still all open. I am careful with water usage. I loathe fast fashion and the thought of textiles going to landfill. In fact, I hired my wedding dress 33 years ago, pioneering a very welcome trend which has become unexpectedly fashionable.

Clause 1 requires the Secretary of State to set at least one long-term environmental target for each of four priority areas. As may by now be obvious, I will focus on the fourth, resource efficiency and waste reduction. Michael Gove’s foreword to the December 2019 resources and waste strategy includes the following:

“Our goal is to move to a more circular economy, which keeps resources in use for longer”.


Three cheers for that, but is this not the time for the Government to develop an indicator of how circular the UK economy is and then to set a long-term target for how circular we want it to become?

The extended producer responsibility of Clause 49 and Schedule 4 will mainly focus on the current consultation on EPR for packaging. However, in the resource and waste strategy, the Government indicated other waste streams for consideration, including the possibility of an EPR scheme for textiles and clothing as an early priority. Given that I made a pledge about five years ago never to buy any new item of clothing, barring underclothes, for the rest of my life, this is welcome news.

As a former board member of WRAP, the Government’s delivery partner, I welcome its latest voluntary agreement, Textiles 2030, designed to provide the UK clothing and textile sector with the tools to enable it to halve its carbon footprint by 2040 on the way to achieving net zero by 2050.

Although plastic is a magical invention, we have to do more to reduce its use. I cannot imagine buying anything, especially bottled water, in a single-use plastic bottle and Clause 54 is welcome. WRAP has already done good work in this area, under the UK Plastics Pact, reporting in December last year that 400 million items classed as problematic or unnecessary were sold by pact members, a reduction of 40% from 2018. This is welcome progress, although there is clearly much more to do.

Finally, I come to my greatest bugbear: food waste, addressed in Clause 56, currently under consultation, which makes standardisation of waste collection requirements to local authorities to collect the same range of material for recycling from households and, belatedly, to provide a separate weekly food waste collection. The noble Lord may know that if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after America and China. A mandatory weekly food waste collection will help to transform our engagement with food and food waste, making people more aware of the amount of food they chuck out.

I remember meeting Rory Stewart when he was Defra Minister over six years ago and him enthusiastically advocating for all this. Why does it take so long and when is the long-delayed consultation on mandatory reporting to be launched? While on the question of food waste, would my noble friend undertake to look again at the issue of feeding this waste, treated at the right temperature, to pigs? Reintroducing this practice, properly regulated, would also have the advantage of reducing the amount of soy, as feed, grown in parts of the world where ancient rainforests are being cut down, not to feed the indigenous people but for our food stock.

The Bill is the first piece of major environmental legislation in 20 years. Leaving the EU has provided us with the chance to radically improve environmental policy and to put the environment at the heart of policy-making. We will not have a second chance and we must grasp the opportunity to be radical with both hands to make this country and the planet a more sustainable place. Government and individuals must play their part. Our very survival as a species is at stake.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Miller, has withdrawn, so I now call the noble Lord, Lord Trees.