British Farming: Competitiveness
Lord Krebs Excerpts(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Baroness is absolutely correct that we talked in our manifesto about the importance of public procurement in supporting our food industry. The Procurement Act allows contracts for certain value thresholds also to be reserved for smaller UK suppliers. We want to look at the big suppliers and the smaller suppliers in order that we can deliver that manifesto commitment as best we can, because 50% is a large amount of our food procurement. Last year, we had a new national procurement policy statement, which puts emphasis on weighting environmental and social outcomes in government contracts. British farmers and local suppliers will be very well placed to meet those outcomes.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, one way to improve the competitiveness of UK farming is through innovation. The Government have invested a considerable amount in research and innovation in relation to agriculture and the food system through UKRI. As a result of that, the UK is at the forefront of a number of novel technologies, including precision breeding and the use of AI to detect animal diseases. In negotiating a new SPS agreement with our colleagues in Europe, will there be a carve-out for these new technologies so that we can continue to develop and use them even if we have a new agreement and dynamic alignment with the European Union?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I am going to have to disappoint the noble Lord in that I am not able to discuss any specific carve-outs that we are looking at during the negotiations with the European Union. What I can say is that the innovative areas that he referred to are under discussion, because they are very important both for our scientific communities and for our farming communities, and those discussions are ongoing.
Environmental Improvement Plan 2025
Lord Krebs Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Lord Krebs
To ask His Majesty’s Government how the Environmental Improvement Plan 2025 will deliver the targets of the Environment Act 2021.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, the environmental improvement plan sets out how the Government will meet the legally binding targets in Sections 1 to 3 of the Environment Act 2021. These targets cover air quality, biodiversity, water quality, resource efficiency and waste, woodland and trees, and marine protected areas. I will not attempt to cover all these areas in my eight minutes, and equally I will not rehearse the debate we had on Tuesday concerning nitrogen pollution, which was highly relevant.
The urgent need for an improved EIP was highlighted last year by the Office for Environmental Protection in its January 2025 progress report. Only nine of 43 targets for the environment were on track, and 20 were largely off track, including targets that covered most of the areas in the EIP. The report said that the new environmental improvement plan
“must show real intent, and focus. It needs to front load efforts to catch up and to set out clearly to all, what has to be done, by whom and by when”.
The report of the OEP covered the year up to March 2024 and therefore reflected the actions of the previous Government. Today’s Question is about whether the current Government’s plans and the new EIP will improve prospects for our environment.
The new environmental improvement plan is distinctly better than its predecessor. It sets out the specific actions that will contribute to achieving the targets and who is responsible. I very much welcome this and congratulate the Government on their intent. However, the contribution of individual actions towards the delivery of targets is not quantified, and I will return to this point later.
In the end, it is not just the targets and the processes but the actual outcomes for the environment that will be the measure of success or failure. Take, for example, sites of special scientific interest. The 4,100 SSSIs in England, covering 4,200 square miles, are among our most precious habitats. They are supposed to enjoy special protection. However, the OEP’s report of 4 December last year concludes that only a third of them are in favourable condition and that many SSSIs have not been monitored for years. This is not new news; it was highlighted more than 30 years ago by Peter Marren, and the data for the past decade suggest that there has been no substantial change—and if anything a steady decrease—in the proportion of SSSIs in favourable condition.
Does the new EIP say anything to convince us that the next decade will be different? Far from pressing its foot down on the accelerator to restore SSSIs, the new EIP delays progress. The commitment in the 2023 environmental improvement plan to have 50% of SSSIs with actions on track to achieve favourable condition by 2028 has been delayed to 2030. The target for all SSSIs to have an up-to-date condition assessment by 2028 has been deferred until 2032. I assume that these delays reflect the reality of what is achievable. Even if we accept this point that there will be delays, I would like to know what is going to change that will deliver the required improvements, given that no improvement has been achieved in the past.
The delivery plan for protected sites was published last month. It includes 10 delivery measures and a monitoring plan. I assume that there must be something in the plan that has convinced Ministers that it will work when previous plans have failed. Can the Minister tell us specifically what aspects of the new plan give her confidence that it will deliver improvements in the condition of SSSIs? For example, does the delivery plan address the four key concerns highlighted by the OEP’s recent report? How many SSSIs are on agricultural land covered by agri-environment contracts, and how many more would be needed by 2030 for the plan to be on track? About half of SSSIs are within national landscapes. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will maintain the biodiversity duty for national landscapes, bearing in mind the recommendations of the Fingleton review?
I now turn to the question of who will deliver the outcomes. Although the EIP sets out clear plans and processes, the actual delivery of the outcomes will often depend on bodies outside government. I am pleased, therefore, that the new EIP recognises that the Government cannot achieve their targets without the actions of others. As the Minister will recall, my Private Member’s Bill was designed to formalise this by placing a statutory duty on public authorities, including landowners and regulators, to contribute to the Environment Act’s targets. Because public authorities such as local councils have many competing demands on their resources, without a statutory duty, this matter will inevitably move to the back of the queue. Would the Minister therefore consider adopting my Private Member’s Bill in support of the delivery of the new EIP? If not, how will public authorities that play a key role be persuaded to prioritise this objective?
I return to the contribution of different actions to delivering the targets. One of the key targets of the Environment Act is halting the decline of species by 2030. This is part of goal 1 in the EIP: restoring nature. That goal is supported by 33 actions, four of which contain the word “deliver”; some of the others include softer actions such as “publish”, “introduce”, “build” and “review”. I would welcome clarification from the Minister on which actions in the EIP will make the largest contribution to halting the decline of biodiversity in the next four years. This is especially relevant given that the latest official biodiversity statistics for England show that many indicators are moving in the wrong direction.
My final point concerns cross-government co-ordination. The new EIP recognises that the delivery of the targets will require concerted action across government departments. This co-ordination will be achieved through a new EIP delivery board. Some activity is already under way. For example, ARIA—the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which is a non-departmental public body of DSIT—recently launched a research programme called Engineering Ecosystem Resilience, which includes the option of gene-editing ecosystems. What role does Defra assume gene editing in ecosystems will have in restoring nature?
I look forward to the contributions of other noble Lords—we have a small but select band with us this afternoon—and to the Minister’s reply.
Nitrogen Reduction, Recycling and Reuse (Environment and Climate Change Committee Report)
Lord Krebs Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I thank our chair for her excellent leadership in this inquiry, our clerk and our policy analyst for their excellent work and our specialist adviser, Professor Mark Sutton, for keeping us on the straight and narrow.
Our chair’s introduction was so excellent that I am tempted to simply say two words, “I agree”, and sit down. On the other hand, now that I am standing, the temptation to carry on speaking is too great. I am going to talk about agriculture. The noble Earl, Lord Leicester, having glanced nervously at me, I am glancing very nervously at him because he actually is a farmer while I have experienced farming only at second or third hand.
Agriculture, as we have heard, is the biggest source of nitrogen pollution, accounting for 87% of ammonia and 69% of nitrous oxide released into the atmosphere and 70% of nitrate leaching into water. The evidence that we heard, as has been said, suggested that nitrogen use in agriculture is inefficient and wasteful and creates unnecessary pollution, although of course that does not apply to the noble Earl, Lord Leicester. According to one estimate we heard, 45% of fertiliser added to crops is lost to the environment.
On our visit to the Netherlands, we saw that there are simple ways to reduce nitrogen pollution from farms. For example, farmers there showed us that dairy cattle can be fed on a diet with less nitrogen in it, which does not affect milk yield but reduces ammonia emissions to the atmosphere. We were also shown how the precision application of slurry, which is mandatory in the Netherlands but not here, reduces the leaching of nitrate into fresh water. In the Netherlands, research results from Wageningen University on how to reduce nitrogen pollution are disseminated to farmers via a peer-to-peer network. For some inexplicable reason, these and other equally effective and inexpensive measures are not mandated or widely adopted in this country. I therefore ask the Minister whether she agrees that we could learn lessons from, and indeed follow, the Dutch example.
We were told that farmers pay a price for their inefficient use of fertiliser. We have already heard some of the figures—Natural England estimated the cost as between £21 and £52 per hectare, totalling about £397 million per year for the agricultural sector, while the Sustainable Nitrogen Alliance, as we have heard from others, quoted a figure of £420 million of fertiliser wasted annually—but there are also much bigger costs to society and to the economy that are not paid for by farmers, the so-called externalities. As our chair mentioned, nitrogen pollution is damaging our ecosystems and the services they provide. According to the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, about 30% of the loss of biodiversity in the UK is attributable to nitrogen pollution, and 99.9% of sensitive habitats exceed the critical load for nitrogen deposition.
Secondly, nitrogen pollution is causing global warming, with all the costs and risks that result. Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas that is 270 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. As I have said, 69% of atmospheric nitrous oxide in this country comes from agriculture.
Thirdly, nitrogen pollution damages our health. Many of our city streets exceed WHO safety limits for fine particulate matter that arises in part from agricultural nitrogen pollution. When you step outside the Palace of Westminster and breathe in these fine particles, remember that it is estimated that between a third and a half of them result from ammonia pollution from agriculture; also remember that they will increase your chances of developing various forms of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, cancer and dementia.
All these impacts of nitrogen pollution impose costs on our economy. As a nation, we would be wealthier, as well as healthier, if we got a grip on the problem. Estimates of the total cost of nitrogen pollution from all sources vary widely, but the WWF quoted a central estimate of around £11 billion per year; agriculture contributes a significant fraction of this. To get a fix on what that looks like, I checked: it is about a sixth of our annual expenditure on secondary education in this country.
Having heard the evidence, I was puzzled. If farmers are generating unnecessary nitrogen pollution that is costly to themselves and even more costly to society in general, why do they carry on doing it? The puzzle is even greater when you learn, as we did, that applying less fertiliser appears not to reduce crop yields; this is described in box 1 of our report. Over the past 40 years, crop yields have tended to increase irrespective of the amount of fertiliser applied. Perhaps, as the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, said, many other factors—rainfall, temperature and so on—affect variation in crop yield. But when fertiliser application went down because of the price increase following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, crop yields were apparently unaffected.
This suggests that factors other than fertiliser use are limiting productivity and, therefore, that farmers are applying too much fertiliser. Why would they do this? We were told by several witnesses that at least part of the problem may be that farmers do not have easy access to appropriate and trusted advice on nitrogen management. The Government agree with this conclusion that clearer advice for farmers is needed. In their reply to our report, they say:
“Defra are developing an online, free-to-use, nutrient management planning tool for Great Britain (NMPT-GB)”—
catchy title. They go on:
“NMPT-GB will be designed to help farmers and land managers in England, Wales, and Scotland to plan and manage nutrient use on their land”.
The tool, which was launched in a public beta version last month, sounds very good but, as far as I could ascertain, it does not contain any new information about fertiliser application. Instead, it uses the pre-existing Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board’s Nutrient Management Guide (RB209). This guide has been available since 2017, but I was not able to find out whether it has been successful in persuading farmers to reduce nitrogen pollution from fertiliser application. I therefore ask the Minister: has there been an assessment of the impact of the AHDB guide so far?
The guide does, however, provide clear advice on how much fertiliser to apply. This is set out on page 16 of the document in a section entitled “Principles of nutrient management and fertiliser use”. The guide states the following:
“The crop nitrogen requirement is the amount of nitrogen that should be applied to give the on-farm economic optimum yield”;
this is the point at which the marginal financial cost of adding more fertiliser would not pay for itself in the marginal financial returns of increased crop yield. In other words, the advice from the AHDB is to maximise net financial gain per hectare; of course, this ignores the other costs of producing the crops, such as machinery and labour. The detailed guidance also provides recommended inputs of nitrogen and other nutrients according to crop type, soil type and rainfall. So the information is out there; it is the just the case that, apparently, farmers either do not use it or do not know about it.
However—I return to the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Leicester—when we heard evidence from the fertiliser industry, it suggested an alternative metric: nitrogen use efficiency. This is the ratio of nitrogen input to nitrogen output. For me—this is the reason why I debated this measure with the committee—the problem with this measure is that it does not tell you about profitability per hectare, which is the thing in which I would have expected farmers to be interested and on which the AHDB guidance is based. Does the Minister agree with me that maximising net financial gain per hectare, as in the AHDB guidance, is a more appropriate guidance metric than maximising nitrogen use efficiency, as claimed by the fertiliser industry?
However, this is not the end of the story. As I have already mentioned, the societal cost of nitrogen pollution is borne not only by the farmer but by the rest of us. The “polluter pays” principle, which is one of the five environmental principles that Ministers should consider when making policy, suggests that these costs should be borne by those who produce the pollution. I therefore ask the Minister whether it would be appropriate to amend the guidance on fertiliser use in future to reflect not just the direct costs of the fertiliser to the farmer but the total cost to the country. Perhaps, if the costs of nitrogen pollution and fertiliser use reflected its true impact and cost to society, as well as the specific cost to farmers, we would see more judicious management of nitrogen and less damaging nitrogen pollution. I look forward to the Minister’s reply and to other contributions to this debate.
Flooding Interventions
Lord Krebs Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right. As someone who lives in a rural area that floods regularly, I am aware of the important role farmers play in managing flood risk and storing water on their land. Farmers can access payments in a number of ways, as I am sure the noble Baroness is aware. One is the farm recovery fund, in cases where damage has occurred and farmers need to recover costs. It pays up to £25,000 and can be important to farmers when they have suffered flooding. We are looking very carefully at the Environment Audit Committee’s recommendations in this area. Farmers storing water on their land is an important way of moving forward, and it is certainly something we are looking at.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, when Flood Re was set up, my understanding was that it was a transitional body that would no longer be necessary after a certain period, once other means of insuring homes at risk of flooding were put in place. Does Flood Re have a limited life expectancy, and if so, what is the estimate?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Lord is right that Flood Re was set up for a certain period of time. I am doing this from memory, and I shall tell the House if I am wrong, but I think it was due to run through to 2036.
We are looking at possible alternative arrangements. Clearly, the last thing we want to do is take away households’ ability to have insurance. We do not want to go back to how it used to be—people being completely uninsurable or having excess limits of, say, £10,000. That is not the future we see for insurance. The noble Lord is right that it has been set up as an intermediate system, and we are looking at ways to move forward.
Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund
Lord Krebs Excerpts(4 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Baroness mentioned the Brexit deal agreed by the previous Government, which provides de facto guarantees for EU boats to UK waters beyond 2026. What we have done is to secure a deal with the EU that ensures returns for our fishing community, including scrapping red tape and restoring shellfish exports to the UK. This demonstrates that we are absolutely committed to the long-term prosperity and sustainability of our fishing industry. On the SPS agreement, I am sure the noble Baroness knows that negotiations are due to start shortly. I cannot give any further details until we move further down the line, but we absolutely want a really good deal for our country.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I am sure the Minister would agree that there is no point investing in our fishing industry if there are no fish to catch. The sad truth is that, according to Oceana UK’s latest report, Deep Decline, over half of the UK fish stocks are being overfished, particularly the top 10 species. What plans do the Government have to ensure that fishing quotas are set on a sustainable basis, so that the stocks can recover and provide our fishermen with livelihoods not just today but in the future?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely right: overfishing has been a real problem and we absolutely need to ensure that it does not happen in the future and that the fishing quotas that are agreed are sustainable. In fact, they are, in theory, sustainable at the moment, but we need to get the best data we can in order to make the best decisions in the future. Clearly, we hope that working with the EU more closely will enable this.
Waste Crime
Lord Krebs Excerpts(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My noble friend is absolutely right to say that this is a really serious problem, and the Government need to get to grips with it. That is why we are taking specific actions to try to start making a real difference in the amount and impact of waste crime in order to genuinely start to reduce what is a terrible blight on our country. We want to crack down. As I said, we have increased the EA’s budget for waste crime enforcement by over 50% this year. The Joint Unit for Waste Crime has nearly doubled in size due to the extra funding we have given. The Environment Agency has been able to increase its front-line criminal enforcement resource. We are also looking for further recruitment to enable enforcement work in the new duties that they will be given. The Environment Agency’s economic crime unit was launched last year and is specifically targeting the financial motivations behind waste crime, which are often huge, so that we can bring in asset freezing and freeze the proceeds of crime actions. We are looking to do a number of things to genuinely get to the bottom of this and tackle the outcomes.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, the Minister will no doubt be familiar with the case of Hoads Wood in Kent that was exposed by the BBC a while back. Hoads Wood is a site of special scientific interest in which trees were cut down and 30,000 tonnes of illegally dumped waste were deposited. It took four years for the Environment Agency to impose a restriction order to prevent this continuing, and now we are faced with a £15 million bill for clean-up. The Environment Agency has said that there are six other sites like Hoads Wood where illegal waste dumping is happening on a large scale. Can the Minister please tell this House, either now or in writing, where these sites are and what is being done to clean them up and prevent continued illegal waste dumping?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I will have to write to the noble Lord and the House about exactly where the sites are because I do not have that information in front of me. When we came into government, we acted to put pressure on to get that area, Hoads Wood, dealt with, because it had been dragging on for far too long, as the noble Lord is aware. That is also why we have brought in the changes that we are making, increasing the Environment Agency’s budget and looking to do more about enforcement, because we do not want these situations dragging on. The blight on the countryside is just too grim.
Global Plastic Pollution Treaty
Lord Krebs Excerpts(6 months ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Baroness’s last point was the main point—getting everybody back to the table. If we are to make a real difference globally, we need those countries with us to appreciate that the production method of plastic has to be part of where we move forward regarding plastic in the future. You cannot solve these issues on their own; it is a global issue. I know that it is incredibly frustrating that we feel that we have stalled. As I said, we have made some progress—we are getting to a better understanding of where other countries are coming from—and we will continue to try to make the further progress that we so badly need.
Lord Krebs (CB)
It was reported last month that the sale of single-use plastic bags in this country jumped from 407 million items to 437 million in one year, a 7% increase. This was largely driven by online shopping, and particularly by the online supermarket Ocado, which accounts for about half of the single-use plastic bags sold. Although Ocado claims that most of its bags are recycled, we know that in the waste hierarchy, avoidance of use comes above recycling, and other supermarkets, such as Waitrose, provide online deliveries without plastic bags. Could the Government engage in conversations with our major supermarkets to encourage them not to use single-use plastic bags for food delivery?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a really important point. We have to continue to reduce our own plastic use in this country. Whereas recycling is important, if you do not have to use it in the first place, that is clearly an even better way to behave. We talk to supermarkets on all sorts of issues, and the noble Lord is absolutely right that this is something that we need to discuss and tackle with them. Consumers are expected to change their behaviour, but it is also important that retailers—and that includes online retailers—ensure that their behaviour is not adding to the plastic pollution problem.
Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations 2025
Lord Krebs Excerpts(10 months ago)
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Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I will speak very briefly and in so doing declare my interest as a scientific adviser to Marks & Spencer. I do not want to repeat what has been said, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that much of the debate this evening has been a repetition of what we heard in Committee and on Report of the primary legislation.
However, I just want to recap on the question of mandatory labelling, which has cropped up in a number of noble Lords’ contributions. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, made the point that it would be very difficult to enforce mandatory labelling because you cannot tell the difference. That is the whole point: precision-bred organisms, as defined in the Bill, are organisms that could be produced by conventional breeding. So, if I were an enforcer, I would not know where to start. My noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington made the point that in due course, these gene-edited, precision-bred products will be pervasive in the food chain. Once there is a wheat that could grow without application of pesticides or could grow more effectively in our climate, it will become pervasive in the food chain. So where does the labelling start and end?
My third point, which was made by my noble friend Lady Freeman, is that it may be up to retailers, on a non-mandatory basis, to label the benefits. So: “Here is a tomato that is better for you”—and it may be labelled like that. It is not the process but the end product that matters. But if we insist on the process, and I agree with what the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, said, we should be equally willing to put labels on conventionally bred organisms—apples, bread or other products—that says, “This product has been produced by bombarding gametes with nuclear radiation”. That is a process: it is the equivalent of gene editing but on the other side of the fence.
My final point is about cross-contamination. If I were a farmer producing gene-edited wheat, I would be really worried about cross-contamination from the neighbouring organic farmer. I would want guarantees that that organic farm was not going to contaminate my gene-edited crop. At the same time, the organic farmer is looking at me and saying, “I don’t want his stuff contaminating my crop”. It is in the interests of both sides to figure out ways of reducing or minimising the risks of cross-contamination. So it is not a one-way street, and I strongly support this secondary legislation.
Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)
My Lords, I shall intervene very briefly on the issue that was highlighted in the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s report on the impact on the UK internal market. As we have heard, products of precision breeding that are approved for sale in England can be sold into Scotland and Wales, and we have had a bit of discussion on that, but at paragraph 47, the committee said:
“In relation to Northern Ireland, Defra explained: ‘Under the Windsor Framework, mutual recognition does not apply to precision bred organism legislation. Therefore, precision bred products must comply with GM legislation before it can be sold in Northern Ireland’.”
At paragraph 48, it said that
“because PBOs are currently not recognised in the EU and therefore in NI”—
since we are under EU law and jurisdiction, despite Brexit—
“producers with PBO authorisation in England will have to label their products as GMO for trade with NI or the EU. This is a matter of concern”.
It talks about the submissions that were made raising fundamental questions about the ability to trade with our EU neighbours. Therefore, I ask the Minister when she comes to reply just to explain and clarify the position of Northern Ireland. What is the impact on Northern Ireland of this particular situation that Northern Ireland finds itself in, compared even to Scotland and Wales?
The fact is that these issues, as the committee says at paragraph 49, could not be addressed in any detail whatever through a de minimis impact assessment. As the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, said, discussions are happening with the devolved Administrations. I would be very interested to hear what stage they are at. What discussion is happening with the Northern Ireland DAERA Minister? I have certainly not heard anything being reported in the Northern Ireland Assembly on this matter, so I would be grateful if the Minister could just clarify those very important issues, which have been highlighted in the report, with regard to Northern Ireland.
Solar Farms and Food Production
Lord Krebs Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
First, I reassure the noble Lord that estimates suggest that ground-mounted solar used just over 0.1% of land in 2022, and we expect any future rollout to take up a very small amount of agricultural land. The large solar farms that I have information about are not on any grade 1 or grade 2 agricultural land, as far as I am aware. However, the noble Lord makes the very important point that the land use framework will be critical in how we manage what our land is used for. Is it used for energy, housing or farming, and so on? We expect the Green Paper to be published for consultation in the new year and I urge all noble Lords to read it and take part in the consultation.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, the Minister referred to the long-awaited land use framework, which she helpfully announced is due to be published in the new year. I would like to ask whether, at the same time, her department has considered what skills and data will be required to use the land use framework to inform decisions such as the one that is being debated in this Oral Question?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
As part of the consultation and the development of the land use framework, we are intending to engage with a very broad range of respondents in order to have meaningful co-design, and resources absolutely have to be part of that.
Waste: Incineration
Lord Krebs Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
As I just mentioned, we are looking to do a review right across the piece on this, so anaerobic waste will certainly be part of that.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, it is all very well to incinerate waste, but does the Minister agree that a real priority should be to reduce the amount of waste that we produce as a country? The real way to deal with this problem is just to produce less waste.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
It is a really important point that the noble Lord makes. If we are moving to a more circular economy, as this Government want, we have to see less residual waste being generated —in fact, less waste as a whole. There is a statutory target to effectively halve residual waste by 2042 from 2019 levels, but there still will be an estimated 17.6 million tonnes of residual waste to manage in 2042. Therefore, we have to look at the bigger picture. How do we actually reduce waste overall?