Oral Answers to Questions
Alistair Strathern Excerpts(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Mr Speaker
On that point, when Ministers make such tours, I hope that they will ensure that local MPs are made aware of the fact, because that did not happen in my case.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mary Creagh)
Metal recyclers are regulated by local authorities and the Environment Agency and must meet specific treatment standards. We are ensuring that online marketplaces and vape producers contribute fairly towards the cost of recycling waste electricals, including metal components, and the sale of disposable vapes will be banned from 1 June.
Alistair Strathern
Six times in the past 12 months, Hitchin has had to endure repeated fires in industrial estates often triggered by lithium-ion batteries. It is clear that we need much tougher regulations to ensure the safety of those sites and, given the inherent risk that their businesses now pose, consideration of whether a time-limited licensing scheme would better enable local authorities to ensure that their location remains appropriate with evolving land use. Will the Minister meet me to ensure that we can make progress on this important issue?
Mary Creagh
I am always happy to meet my hon. Friend. Battery-related fires risk lives, livelihoods and the environment. The Environment Agency is currently reviewing approximately 2,000 metal recycling permits. The Hitchin shredder site is midway through its review, and a revised permit will be issued shortly. The Environment Agency has also produced new regulatory guidance on metal shredding and will consult on guidance for waste batteries in the spring.
Avian Influenza
Alistair Strathern Excerpts(3 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Daniel Zeichner
The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point. As he will be aware, significant international trade issues are involved, but as we look to a world in which we seem to have more and more of these cases, that is certainly something that we keep under consideration.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
I thank the Government for their strong and fast response, which I know will be a big reassurance for lots of the farming communities impacted. May I ask the Minister to provide a bit more detail about the support we are giving not just to those who are directly impacted now, but to those who are understandably very deeply concerned about what this may mean for their businesses over the coming months?
Daniel Zeichner
I thank my hon. Friend for his very important question. I can assure him that an entire apparatus is in place to ensure that all reassurance can be given to the kind of businesses that the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) described. From an animal welfare point of view, we will ensure that everybody involved in the sector has the kind of advice and support that is needed. If my hon. Friend has colleagues who wish to look at the advice, they should look at the webpages available on Government websites, which are significant and thorough. If people need advice, they should not hesitate to come to my officials or to me, and we will point them in the right direction.
Environmental Protection
Alistair Strathern Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
I welcome the regulations, which are as important as they are long overdue. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for the zeal she has brought to her role in ensuring that after several years of dither and delay, we finally have a Bill to bring this important measure forward.
For far too long, we as a society have not grappled with the blights of plastic pollution and litter. With over 75% of the litter across our high streets made up of the type of drink bottles we are talking about, the measure will be an important way of tackling issues that we know our communities care about. Fantastic local groups such as Plastic Free Hitchin and Shefford, litter picking associations and other community groups in my constituency play their part, doing everything they can to keep my community and the countryside clear of litter. We owe it to them to ensure that as a Government we do our bit, too.
Back in 2018, the previous Government confirmed that they were looking at the idea of such a measure, so it is a matter of great regret that we have waited so many years for one and that the Opposition have provided little support for it today. That lost time should not just be cause for embarrassment, as we have seen so many other countries stealing a run on the measure and introducing a scheme that has been shown to work in jurisdiction after jurisdiction. That failure is literally littered all across our countryside. The paths that make my community so special and our rivers, lakes, oceans and beaches that we are all so proud of as a country are littered with plastic pollution that could have been tackled had the measure been brought forward earlier.
We know that where similar schemes have been introduced across the world there have been real benefits. There have been dramatic increases in returns—90% and above is quite typical for such plastic return schemes, but the current rate for our kerbside collection scheme is just 70%. We can ensure that we are doing more to improve circularity and the collection of virgin plastic so that we have the high-quality supply stream for recyclability that the industry is crying out for—that is why the Food & Drink Federation supports the measure. And we can ensure that we tackle littering, to address the issues that are blighting too many of our communities.
Given the need to act at pace, which was so lacking under the previous Government, I absolutely understand why we are focusing on important quick wins. However, it would be remiss of me not to address a wider recycling issue in my community that I have raised several times with the Minister: metal recycling. Five times in the last year, people in Hitchin have woken up to plumes of smoke and possible contamination in the air, as time and again local metal recycling plants have caught fire, often triggered by lithium-ion batteries making their way into the waste source. By working together—and trying to knock heads together—between councils, the Environment Agency and other authorities with a remit, we are looking to make progress, but there is clearly also a case for national action to ensure that the Environment Agency has the powers it needs to address that problem at source, and that we have wider measures on the recycling of lithium-ion batteries to reduce the risk of their ending up as contaminants in metal recycling in the first place. I will continue to press the Minister on that, but I know from my conversations with her that she is alive to the risks in that space. I hope that, over the course of this Parliament, we can deliver real change on that, too.
In the meantime, I am incredibly proud to support this important measure. Ensuring that we learn from the successes and challenges facing other jurisdictions will be important, as will ensuring that we have the right level of deposits, the right infrastructure in place, and the right support for smaller retailers to take part in the scheme.
Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank my hon. Friend for his excellent speech. He makes a valid point about the importance of the measures not only for the environment but for business and retailers. Does he agree that this legislation, which is, as he points out, absolutely overdue, will benefit not only the environment and our wombles—we also have some in Harlow—but business, too?
Alistair Strathern
Absolutely. It will be important to establish close collaboration to ensure that the scheme is as effective as possible. There is a reason the Food & Drink Federation supports the measures: without them, it will not have the supply of high-quality recycled plastics needed to hit the targets that it is so keen to hit and is often already committed to. Without the legislation, those targets become almost impossible.
I will conclude my remarks by building on those of my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), who highlighted the historical importance of good cross-party consensus and the importance of climate and nature issues. For a long time, this measure had cross-party support, and it is deeply regrettable that that does not seem to be the case today. I take some heart from the Conservatives’ lack of enthusiasm to leap in and speak bombastically about their newfound opposition to the measures, which I hope is a sign that there may be space in the coming months to work more collaboratively to ensure that we support the measures to be as effective as possible.
I am incredibly grateful to the Minister for lending me her ear on the important issue of metal recycling in Hitchin, and for the leadership that she has shown on this legislation, which will make a real difference for my community and those across the country. It is about time that we lead on making it a reality.
Independent Water Commission
Alistair Strathern Excerpts(3 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Steve Reed
The hon. Gentleman makes important points. The areas he refers to will be in scope for the commission. I hope he will make his own representations to ensure those points are heard and fully considered before we get the findings in the summer of next year.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
Residents in my constituency have been disgusted by the degradation of our rural waterways across the east of England, as well as by the hollowing out of reservoir capacity across the country. I welcome the new Government and the new Secretary of State’s renewed leadership on these issues, but it is clear that under the previous Government weakened regulation and regulators played their part in facilitating the mess we have inherited. What assurances can he give my constituents that we will be beefing up the regulators and giving them the power they need to take the action we all want to see?
Steve Reed
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the previous Government deliberately weakened the regulators. They kept regulation too weak to hold the water companies to account and to ensure that we got the investment which could have maintained a better standard of infrastructure and stopped the level of pollution that his and everyone else’s constituents have had to face. We have already taken steps through the Water (Special Measures) Bill to give the regulator more teeth. The commission will be looking root and branch at the role of regulation, governance and the regulator, to ensure we have a system that is fit for the future that will guarantee clean water for decades to come.
Flooding: Bedfordshire
Alistair Strathern Excerpts(4 months ago)
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Blake Stephenson
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I agree that that is something the Government should be looking at.
During the recent flooding, I was appalled to learn that drains and sewers in the new town of Wixams were overloaded with surface floodwater. Seventeen years after construction began in Wixams, the drainage infra- structure should be adequate to accommodate many more houses than have so far been built. I urge the Minister to join me in pressing Anglian Water to take urgent action to expand its sewerage and drainage infra- structure.
Wixams is merely the most obvious example of a problem that residents are seeing repeatedly with development. House by house, development by development, infrastructure is failing to keep pace. While an individual development might not be enough to overwhelm the system or cause knock-on flooding impacts, the accumulated weight of development is creating huge problems across the country—including in Maulden in my constituency, where development has crept gradually up the slope of the Greensand ridge, resulting in water having fewer places to stop and soak, so that it instead surges down into the village. While the flooding infrastructure for these new developments might in theory be sufficient for planners to justify development, planning is failing to cope with the demands placed on it by multiple and interconnected developments, which is piling pressure on to networks and our natural environment.
With the Government set to review the planning system and ask for our towns and villages to take thousands of additional homes, I implore the Minister to work with colleagues to deliver reforms that require flooding authorities to take a wider systems view of the impact of developments. We need to ensure that housing targets do not put the delivery of new homes over the habitability of housing stock, or the safety and sustainability of our communities.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and for securing such an important debate not only for his constituents, but for all Bedfordshire Members present. The point he is making is really important, and is felt keenly by my residents in Langford, on Southland Rise, where the failure of flood prevention measures put in place as part of a new development meant that several of them have had catastrophic flooding in a very short space of time over the past few weeks. Does he share my view that not only is consideration of flooding risk through local and national planning frameworks clearly in need of review, but we need to ensure that measures are in place for robust enforcement, to ensure that the flooding mitigation measures that are included in new developments actually work as it is claimed they should?
Blake Stephenson
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. That story is felt and heard all across Mid Bedfordshire, and I agree with the points he made.
As a starting point, I would like the Government to consider urgently introducing secondary legislation to bring into effect schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. The Minister smiles, so she perhaps has a point to make on that when she winds up. I understand from a recent answer to my written question that the Minister wants to be mindful of the impact of over-regulation on developers, but building homes in a way that increases the flooding risk in our towns and villages does nothing to alleviate the housing crisis.
We must also consider the benefits of nature and nature-based solutions. Natural upstream solutions would help capture water and absorb some of the worst impacts of flooding. The Bedford and Milton Keynes waterway park is a great local example of a project that has the potential to remove water during flooding—and, indeed, to deliver water when it is most needed during droughts—and we must press ahead and deliver it at pace.
In addition, we need the Government to look again at their plans to designate inferior-quality areas of the countryside for development, and instead commit to a bold strategy of restoring nature, and in so doing, creating natural flood defences for our towns and villages. In our towns and villages themselves, I would like the Government to commit to a natural regeneration programme, using trees and nature to create sponge cities by enhancing drainage to prevent surface water flooding.
I will conclude with a final lesson that I hope the Minister will reflect on. My constituents were disappointed that, while she took the time to visit those in nearby Leighton Buzzard and to observe the impacts of flooding there, our towns and villages in Mid Bedfordshire received no attention from the Government at all. With a major road closed and a substantial number of houses and businesses impacted, had the flooding in Mid Bedfordshire been concentrated in a single major urban area, I have no doubt that we would have attracted some specific focus.
I have raised questions with the Minister and the Department that remain unanswered. I urge the Government to remember that rural areas are impacted by flooding too, and that they should be properly served by this Government, not an afterthought.
Farming and Food Security
Alistair Strathern Excerpts(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Steve Reed
I am very pleased to say that I have already had two meetings with the Northern Ireland Environment Minister to talk about how we can co-operate better to support farmers in Northern Ireland. I have also been speaking with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who shares that interest.
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
Farmers and families across my constituency were again hit by devastating flooding recently. Does the Secretary of State agree that the continual recurrence of these issues highlights the previous Government’s failure for far too long to take flooding seriously? Can he reassure farmers and families right across my rural community that he will take all the action needed not only to mount a co-ordinated, multi-agency response in the aftermath of flooding, but to ensure proper mitigation in the long term?
Steve Reed
I had the pleasure of visiting my hon. Friend’s constituency and a farm there during the election campaign, and I thoroughly recognise the point that he raises. It is a little hypocritical, is it not, for the Conservative party to complain that not enough is being done on flooding, when their Government left flood defences in the worst condition ever recorded?