Queen’s Speech

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, as someone who has campaigned on the issue of plastic bags for many years, I strongly welcome the commitment in the gracious Speech to reduce their use. Discarded plastic bags are iconic symbols of waste, be they catching the wind in high streets or flapping in rural hedgerows. However, the issue is bigger than just the visible litter on our streets and in our countryside; it is about the dangers that plastic bags pose to our wildlife—if they are discarded on the beach and into the sea they can choke or poison fish, animals and birds—and about the contribution that they make to our carbon emissions. Their creation and transportation consumes non-renewable resources, including oil, and their disposal contributes to our greenhouse gas emissions, taking 500 to 1,000 years to degrade.

As the Minister reminded us in his opening remarks, supermarkets in England gave out 7 billion single-use carrier bags in 2012 alone, and that figure has been rising here year on year, but not elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In the Republic of Ireland, plastic bag use fell by 90% following the introduction of a plastic bag charge in 2002. An equally dramatic drop in usage of 76% came after Wales introduced a charge for single-use plastic bags in 2011, and a charge of 5p in Northern Ireland introduced last year resulted in £1 million going to local environmental projects.

The coalition Government are therefore to be applauded that next year a 5p charge on single-use plastic carrier bags will be introduced in England. Given that Scotland is bringing in a minimum 5p charge this October, shoppers will have an incentive not to use plastic bags wherever they shop in our—we hope—still United Kingdom.

There have been mutterings about this initiative outlined in the gracious Speech. At a time of tight budgets, should we really be asking people to pay more when they go shopping? If shoppers take their own bags, however, they do not have to pay—and they are already paying in their council tax the huge hidden costs of disposing of these bags in household waste. That is not even counting the cost of cleaning up littered carrier bags on our beaches, which Keep Britain Tidy estimates costs us taxpayers in England around £10 million every year.

What is really good news is that our Government’s plans to charge 5p for our carrier bags will result in vital funds going to local good causes. The proceeds of this charge will stay with the organisations that collect them and not come back to the Treasury. To that end, I make a plea today to fellow Peers who sit on the boards of supermarkets, or who have influence within them, to challenge them to think now about how they can donate the profits of these schemes to local good causes.

Politics and legislation are sometimes about big-picture, sweeping changes which revolutionise our country, like the same-sex marriage Act. However, politics is also about changing everyday life in small ways that actually make a big difference. I firmly believe that a charge on plastic bags has the potential to make all of us think a bit more about our impact on the planet, raising the national consciousness about the role that each of us can and must play if we are to tackle collectively the problems of a wasteful society and respond to the challenges of climate change.