Single Use Carrier Bags Charges (England) (Amendment) Order 2021.
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, like all other noble Lords in Grand Committee today, I support this statutory instrument and thank the Minister for his eloquent introduction.
This measure will certainly be a means, but still only one step, in helping to tackle the damage that plastic causes to our environment. It is no surprise that I support it since it was the Liberal Democrats in the coalition Government who championed the introduction of a levy on plastic bags. Given the success of charging for single-use carrier bags in driving down usage, it is right that we now raise that charge to help to drive it down even further, as the Government’s impact assessment indicates that it will.
Equally, I support extending the obligations to all retailers. I was not persuaded at the time of the merits of exemption. Indeed, a number of representatives of small businesses said at the time that they did not oppose being included, so I see the measure as a belated rectification of that.
Having said that, I have three questions for the Minister, which I informed him of in advance. First, why are the Government making the reporting requirements less onerous for franchises? In the draft guidance to retailers on the reporting and record-keeping requirements, there is a section which states that if you are part of a franchise model, whether you report and keep records depends on your size and not the size of the franchise overall. If you own 10 corner shops, each staffed by 24 full-time equivalent people, your total staff head count of 240 people would be below the 250 FTE threshold and you would not have to report. That is different from the way that franchises are dealt with in the current packaging regulations. There, a franchise is covered by the requirements depending on the size of the franchise overall, not the size of the individual franchise businesses. In other words, you could get out of doing anything only if the franchise as a whole fell under the de minimis threshold of how much packaging you used each year.
Will the Minister explain the rationale for the decision to introduce less robust reporting? While it is reasonable that a single family-owner corner shop should not have to report and keep records on bag use, many franchises which are perfectly capable of recording and reporting this information via their head office will not have to as long as they make sure that none of their individual franchises employs more than 250 people. If you run a few corner shops but are part of a franchise, you would get your single-use carrier bags via its head office to reduce packaging run costs and maintain consistent branding. The head office could therefore provide the information for all franchised shops to obey the reporting requirements. Without this, we will not know whether all smaller shops are charging for bags unless local authorities mount secret shopper expeditions. Frankly, given how hard-pressed local authorities are, we know that that is just not going to happen. This is an unnecessary exemption and a retrograde step.
Secondly, do the Government have any plans to introduce mandatory reporting for bags for life? The reporting requirements for single-use carrier bags will change next January, but there is mounting anecdotal evidence of a shift from single-use carrier bags to bags for life. Research in 2019 found that the 10 largest retailers were handing out more than double the number of bags for life anticipated in the Government’s initial impact assessment. There have been welcome initiatives. The noble Lord, Lord Mann, referred to one of them: Morrisons’ commitment to stop selling plastic bags for life. That it says it will remove 3,200 tonnes of plastic and almost 100 million plastic bags every year gives a sense of the scale of the remaining challenge—as I would call it, the plastic drift from single-use carrier bags to bags for life.
The drift may be accentuated by the low cost of these bags for life—20p when I asked in my local Sainsbury’s at the weekend, whereas Green Alliance and the EIA say that Ireland charges the equivalent of 70p, which has led to a 90% reduction in sales. There is also the fact that the money that retailers make on bags for life is all bottom-line profit; unlike with single-use carrier bags, they do not have to donate the money to good causes. I therefore urge the Government to require retailers to report so that the data can be collected so that we will know the size of the bag-for-life market and can determine whether a rise in their cost is now needed.
Finally, I welcome this statutory instrument and other government action, such as the ban on plastic cotton buds, straws and stirrers. Other initiatives, such as the proposed tax on plastic packaging, the Environment Bill’s delayed bottle deposit return scheme and the confirmation in a recent Written Answer to me that the Government are minded to ban oxo-degradables, which break down into tiny microplastics, will all be welcome when they eventually see the light of day. In the meantime, there is a real need to tackle myriad other single-use plastic items bloating our supermarket shelves in coffee pods, teabags, single-serve sachets, biscuit trays and fruit punnets, to name but a handful. What further steps are the Government taking now to help retailers get similarly problematic and unnecessary plastic off our supermarket shelves and to enable consumers to play the part they really want to play in tackling plastic waste to protect our precious environment?
Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Bill
Baroness Parminter ExcerptsFriday 16th April 2021
(3 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Bill 2019-21 View all Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Bill 2019-21 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 3 February 2021 - (3 Feb 2021)
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, I welcome and support this Bill, which will increase sentencing for animal welfare offences from six months to five years. It has been ably introduced today by the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and I commend him and Chris Loder in the other place for all they have done on this matter.
In January 2017, when I first asked in this House what plans the Government had to increase penalties for animal welfare offences, the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, replied that the Government had no current plans to increase the maximum penalties for those offences. It is thanks to campaigning across parties and in civil society—I pay tribute to the work of the RSPCA, Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and others—that those arguments, already being made again today, have led the Government to reconsider. I thank them for that.
As I say, the case has been made powerfully and I am not going to repeat it. But we are all human and I felt a fair degree of emotion—indeed, abject horror—when hearing of some of the cases which have been making a mockery of our sense of justice. The noble Lord, Lord Randall, mentioned some of them, but the one that really turned my stomach was of a man torturing a hedgehog by cutting off its limbs and covering its face with candle wax. He received just 26 weeks’ imprisonment. It is right that this Bill will introduce an appropriate level of punishment for the crime and that our important principle of justice will be upheld.
There is, however, more we can and should do for those abused and ill-treated animals who survive these appalling cases and are rescued by animal welfare centres and organisations in England and Wales. At present, these organisations rehome those animals, but they have to wait until the court proceedings are completed to do so. In Scotland, they have agreed to introduce a law allowing rehoming after 20 days.
The Minister would be surprised if I did not always ask for yet more to protect animals. I would not dream of prejudicing this important legislation in clearing its final parliamentary hurdles. However, I hope that once the Bill is safely on the statute book, the Government will turn their attention to this matter and introduce legislation to stop the delays, often of months and sometimes years, which prevent abused and ill-treated animals getting a second chance of a loving and permanent home.
Domestic Animals
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
I am hopeful that the Queen’s Speech, when it happens, will include a number of measures to improve animal welfare, not just those that appeared in our most recent manifesto. As my noble friend will know, we recently consulted on ending live exports for slaughter and fattening. We are analysing the responses that we received and will be publishing the government response very soon. We hope to have legislation in place to end live animal exports for slaughter and fattening by the end of the year, and hopefully sooner than that.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
There has been an explosion in the last two years of dogs imported into the UK—mainly puppies with poor disease status from Romania. What are the Government doing to increase the minimum age for imported dogs from 15 weeks to 24 weeks, which would solve this problem?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
Now that the transition period has ended, we have the opportunity to manage our own pet travel and commercial importation rules. We are actively liaising with and listening to the concerns of stakeholders, not least Cats Protection, and there has been recent parliamentary work from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee. We are considering a whole range of recommendations in the area raised by the noble Baroness.
United Nations Biodiversity Conference
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
My Lords, it is absolutely right to say that climate change and biodiversity are two sides of the same coin. They represent the gravest threat we face, and we cannot tackle one effectively without also tackling the other. There is no pathway to net zero emissions without a major increase in support for nature and nature-based solutions, so I wholeheartedly agree with the noble Baroness. It is not the case that the Government are refusing to include the mechanism she proposes—the target around biodiversity and state of nature. This is a live issue and one we are engaging with very actively. I hope that when we bring the Bill to the House, we will be able to have a meaningful discussion about that.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
Targets for previous CBDs have been missed, as the Minister has acknowledged. None was legally binding, unlike the Paris climate agreement. Do the Government support the post-2020 CBD framework, including legal obligations for all countries to deliver against global targets?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
The Government are keen to push for the maximum possible ambition. There is no area in the discussion where any country is having to drag us kicking and screaming. We are the country pushing hardest for that ambition, but there is a line somewhere between the maximum ambition and what is deliverable. Things that may appear relatively mundane and not particularly radical to the UK are nevertheless big sells for certain countries. Our job is to use every diplomatic skill and lever we have to bring the rest of the world with us, and we will take the world as far as we possibly can. Where that takes us is hard to predict.
Trees
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
I can also provide the noble Baroness with the reassurance that she is looking for. Given that we will use public money to deliver much of the plan for trees that we have and that was in our manifesto, we want to achieve the biggest possible return for taxpayers. That means using those funds and the wider programme to deliver for biodiversity, people and climate change. Our strong default position will be for mixed native woodlands and, in some cases, facilitating the natural regeneration of land in the right places.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, President Biden has launched the Civilian Climate Corps, echoing Roosevelt’s programme after the economic slump of the great depression, which created thousands of public jobs, transformed the US natural infrastructure and planted 3 billion trees. Will the Government introduce a national nature service to tackle carbon, build bio- diversity and create green jobs?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
I cannot make the guarantee that the noble Baroness asks for, but the Government’s combined intention to tackle the appalling biodiversity loss of the last few decades and to reverse the tree loss we have seen over a longer period will set us on track to turn the trajectory of decline around in the quickest possible time, as we committed to in our 25-year environment plan. The Prime Minister announced just a few months ago that we are committed to signing up alongside other countries to protect 30% of our land and 30% of our oceans by 2030—the end of this decade—and the funds have been set aside to enable us to do so.
Biodiversity: Impact of Neonicotinoids
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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The Deputy Speaker (The Earl of Kinnoull) (Non-Afl)
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, how is this decision compliant with the Aarhus convention on environmental justice, given that the application documents and the chief scientist’s advice to the Government are being kept secret, and that, while the NFU lobbied undercover, the public could not participate in the process?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
The ability to consider this emergency authorisation comes from EU legislation. It is not a case of reducing our standards after leaving the EU, since 10 EU countries including Belgium, Denmark and Spain granted emergency authorisations for neonicotinoid seed treatments used on sugar beet in 2020, just as we have done this year. Our position on these pesticides remains exactly the same; there is no divergence. We supported restrictions in 2018 and this is a narrow emergency authorisation, which has been made on the merits of the case.
Animal Welfare and Wildlife Crime Offences
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
Animal experimentation clearly has an enormously important role to play. It needs to be science-led, and there needs to be a clear understanding that the results of such research are applicable and useful in the context of human health and medicine. Broadly speaking, the Government’s view is that animal experimentation should be minimised to that absolutely necessary in pursuit of human health.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
Does the Home Office plan to make wildlife crime a recordable offence, so that proper statistics can be collected, as what is measured shows what matters?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
Recordable offences are set outside Defra, although Defra has been working with, for example, the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group, led by police forces across England and Wales. Our view is that strong penalties are already in place for offences committed against birds of prey and other wildlife, with significant sanctions available to the courts to hand down to those convicted. Most wildlife crimes carry the risk of an unlimited fine and/or a six-month custodial sentence. However, senior government and enforcement officers have identified raptor persecution as a national wildlife crime priority, which means that greater resources will be devoted to clamping down on what we believe has been an increasing crime during the Covid period.
Repair and Reuse Programmes
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
My Lords, we work very closely with all the devolved Administrations and are permanently looking for ways to improve our approach to tackling waste issues. I point the noble Lord to the Environment Bill, which will shortly be coming to this House. It includes clauses that will enable us to introduce secondary legislation on product design; for example, to support durable, repairable, recyclable products. It will also enable us to introduce extended producer-responsibility schemes for a whole range of products, which will also encourage manufacturers to ensure that the products they make are designed to be recycled, reused or repaired.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, the European Union has committed to establishing a right to repair, guaranteeing consumers the availability of spare parts or access to repair. Will the Government’s long-delayed consultation on the waste prevention programme offer English consumers the same?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
The new waste prevention programme has been delayed. I simply point to the pandemic, which has delayed much of our progress on this and many other issues; in addition, the date that the waste prevention programme was due for release coincided with the last general election and purdah rules. However, we have developed a new draft waste prevention programme for consultation. It will include a range of measures, including to encourage more reuse and repair. It is due to be launched in the next few months and will reflect a very serious ambition on the part of the Government to move towards a zero-waste or circular economy.
Waste Prevention Programme
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Parminter
To ask Her Majesty’s Government when they plan to publish their revised Waste Prevention Programme for England.
The Minister of State, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con) [V]
My Lords, we published our review of the waste prevention programme 2013 this summer and hope to publish our revised draft waste prevention programme for consultation in the next few months. It will build on our resources and waste strategy, published in 2018, which sets out our plans to move away from the inefficient linear economic model of “take, make, use, throw” to a more circular economy.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, the climate crisis demands urgent action to reduce carbon emissions from waste and to keep resources in use for as long as possible. In their delayed waste prevention programme, will the Government introduce an explicit target for waste prevention by 2050, as the Welsh Government already have?
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]
The International Resource Panel estimates that resource extraction and processing of materials contributes to about 30% of global particulate matter emissions, 50% of total global greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress. Industrial emissions from manufacturing are responsible for approximately 21% of UK domestic emissions. The Environment Bill will include a target relating to resources and waste. As I speak, that target is being assessed with a view to being introduced .
Environment and Wildlife (Miscellaneous Amendments etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020
Baroness Parminter Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his opening remarks and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for putting this statutory instrument in its rightful context of why we need CITES as an important tool in helping tackle the devastating biodiversity loss that we are facing on a global scale and, particularly in the context of CITES, the devastating loss of our global wildlife.
This is of course another operability statutory instrument required because the Government have agreed that there will be a border in the North Sea, given that Northern Ireland will remain in the European Union’s single market and customs union after the end of this year, when we sadly leave the Union. However, as my noble friend Lord Greaves said, we support this statutory instrument but have a few questions and issues, some of which have been mentioned by other colleagues, so I shall not dwell on them at length—which I am sure will please other noble Lords. I also have some questions of my own.
The first issue I want to raise, which has not been raised by other noble Lords, is whether the paperwork or unloading centres for the trade in wildlife will be ready in time. At the moment, Northern Ireland inputs hardly any CITES species and there is limited trade from Northern Ireland into the rest of Great Britain, but, frankly, we do not know what will happen to trade patterns once we leave the EU. It may well be that the trade is diverted up through Ireland and across to the UK; we will therefore need adequate offloading centres and checks.
Will the ports at Larne, Belfast and Warrenpoint be ready by January to fulfil the obligations for checks on animals? Defra says that the Border Force has sufficient staff to meet all the requirements for CITES checks. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us how many staff it has appointed to deal with the potential increase. Also, can he update us on DAERA’s plans to build an extension at Belfast for the extra holding and inspection facilities, and the anticipated completion date?
The noble Lord, Lord Randall, and others mentioned issues that were rightly brought to our attention by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and ClientEarth, including changing the regulations and removing the Secretary of State’s powers to prohibit the holding of specimens. I agree with them that, given our current concerns over the impact of zoonotic diseases, the Minister needs to say a bit more about why we are not retaining the power in these regulations.
Further, I agree with the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and others questioning the loss of scientific expertise; ClientEarth expressed the same concerns very forcefully, and I look forward to the Minister’s answer on that.
There is one final thing that I would ask the Minister to update us on. Of course, the regulations make it clear what will happen to wild animals that are pets coming to and from Northern Ireland. They will require new processes and new documentation. Can the Minister confirm what I have not heard confirmed: that taking domestic pets, such as our cats and dogs, to Northern Ireland will be the same as taking them to France after 1 January—that is, they will require pet passports? If so, when will we receive a statutory instrument to that effect? In the list of Defra SIs coming up before the end of the year, I have not yet seen anything on that issue.