Environment Bill

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 30th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I too support Amendment 124, so ably explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and agree on how urgent it is for the Secretary of State to publish a scheme for disposal of single-use plastics, and to have that done within a time limit that reflects the sense of urgency that we have heard from so many noble Lords today. I also support many of the aims of the other amendments in this group.

These amendments touch on everyday family life. As the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, explained, anyone who saw the “Panorama” programme a few weeks ago would surely wish to support policies that can help to stop the build-up of fatbergs and pollutants which are already so damaging to our sewers and rivers. The figure of 7 million wet wipes being flushed down our toilets each day, without people generally even realising the damage they are causing to the environment and our sewers—they do not even give it a second thought—is something that this Bill may have the opportunity to address. Making sure that there are clear warnings on such products and that these parts of a household’s normal weekly shopping are both identified as being as damaging as they are and, ultimately, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said, replaced by biodegradable alternatives which do not cause that same damage are issues which I believe have not yet filtered through into the public consciousness. Given the work that we have done, we understand them—I declare an interest in that my son works in a company involved in replacements for plastics—but extending responsibility for this issue so that everybody becomes aware of it rather than just those in the know could help significantly to produce a step change in consumer behaviour and stop plastics clogging up so many riverbanks, sewers, landfill sites and other areas.

Taxation is clearly an option. Through the price mechanism, it would make sense—I believe that we are coming to this in a later group—to ensure that the most damaging plastics, which have caused significant damage already, are more punitively taxed so that consumers are less keen to use them. In that regard, I add my support to Amendment 128 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on consistency in any framework of public warning messages that potentially will be introduced to help public awareness. However, ideally, as I said, in the not-too-distant future the best option would be for those products that contain plastics that last for potentially thousands of years and do so much damage to be replaced with options that do not hang around and pollute our environment in the way people are currently doing without quite realising the extent of the damage.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, this group concerns packaging and single-use items. I shall speak in support of Amendment 292 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. All the amendments in this group have a degree of urgency.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, spoke passionately to Amendment 119, which would ensure that producer responsibility for new packaging is in place for January 2024. I have spoken before about the need for producer responsibility on plastics and I fully support the amendment. The noble Baroness is quite right to emphasise the need for producer responsibility to be implemented without delay. After all, there has been extensive consultation. I am obviously more impatient than the noble Baroness, since I would have chosen an earlier date. However, I accept that manufacturers should be allowed time to change their practices and that this cannot be achieved overnight.

My noble friend Lord Chidgey quite rightly raised the issue of those households with septic tanks, a large percentage of which will be in rural areas. For the septic tanks to function as designed, chemical cleaning products and wipes should not be used and should be phased out nationally. I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, on this point.

My noble friends Lord Bradshaw and Lady Scott of Needham Market, and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, would require the Secretary of State to publish a scheme by December 2021 on the disposal of single-use plastics. This urgent timeframe meets with my approval. Wet wipes are causing tremendous problems and should not be left to volunteers to clear up.

My noble friend Lord Teverson’s Amendment 129 provides part of the answer for the Government. If all products were adequately and clearly labelled using a consistent format that the public could easily recognise, they would be more likely to read the information and take notice. This commonly approved and consistent design cannot be in 6 point font on the very bottom of the package. It will need to be of sufficient size for the purchaser to easily read on the front of the package, rather than having to hold it up over their heads to read what is on the bottom, which often happens when the package contains wet food.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, raised built-in obsolescence in household goods such as washing machines. Redundant white goods are extremely difficult to get rid of.

My noble friend Lady Humphreys spoke about the use of single-use plastics and the role of the Welsh Senedd, which wants to ban 19 types of single-use items, including plastic cutlery. The Senedd is concerned about the impact of single-use plastics coming over from the rest of the UK into Wales.

Amendment 292 is definitely not on a glamorous subject. There is no doubt that disposable nappies are extremely convenient. I wonder whether there is a Peer in the Chamber, including the Minister, who has not changed the nappy of a baby at some stage. My mother bought me two dozen terry nappies when I was expecting my first baby. They lasted until my second child no longer needed them and they still had a life in the garage as cleaning cloths. There were disposable nappies around, but they were costly and so were used only when we went on holiday. My granddaughter was kitted out with reusable nappies—a very different kettle of fish from the terrys of my day. They had a set of poppers, which meant they could fit a range of sizes, and were extremely colourful.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville]

123: Clause 50, page 30, line 13, at end insert “including fly-tipped items.”
Member’s explanatory statement
Farmers and landowners currently have to pay for the removal of all fly-tipping. This amendment is intended to extend the 'polluter pays' principle to fly-tipping.

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[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to this group of amendments in my name and thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, for adding his name to Amendments 123 and 136.

Fly-tipping is a blight on the countryside. Sometimes it is individuals not bothering to dispose of their larger redundant items of furniture properly. Sometimes it is criminal activity on the part of opportunists who offer to dispose of awkward items for households for a fee, then take them away and dump them in the countryside—mostly in some quiet rural lane, in a field gate or on a farmer’s lane.

Evidence suggests that fly-tipping affects 67% of farmers and that it costs them upwards of £47 million a year to clear up fly-tipped waste. In 2019-20, there were just under 1 million incidents of fly-tipping in England—the equivalent of nearly 114 every hour—at a cost to local authorities of millions. It is having a significant impact on our rural areas and wildlife. These miscreants do not have to pay for their actions; it is the landowner who has to pay to clear up the resultant mess, and there is little redress through the courts.

How often do we see the countryside littered with cartons from takeaway food? It really is time that the manufacturers and producers of this type of waste picked up the cost of clearing it up—McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken spring to mind, and I am sure your Lordships can think of others. It is often very difficult to trace the person who has done the fly-tipping but much easier to see who has manufactured the waste. The “polluter pays” principle is key in helping to solve the problem. This issue cannot be sidestepped.

The Bill makes provision to reduce the occurrence of fly-tipping and littering by the introduction of deposit schemes and powers for secondary legislation to tackle waste crime and the scourge of littering, but this will not help with the larger items that are often left in quantity on farmland. The Bill will introduce new measures for regulators, including local authorities, to tackle waste crime and illegal activity. It would be helpful to know what these measures are likely to be but, as they are expected to be determined in secondary legislation, perhaps the detail has yet to be written. The Bill also enables the Secretary of State to make regulations to amend the primitive range of penalties for existing fixed penalty notices. This is critical in attempting to dissuade people from fly-tipping. Can the Minister say why this power is not being extended to local authorities and the police? They are much closer to the problem on the ground and may well know who the likely culprits are.

Private landowners are liable for any waste dumped on their land and responsible for clearing it away and paying the cost. If they do not act or inform the local authorities about the fly-tipped waste, they risk prosecution for illegal storage of waste. This is a nonsense. Now is the time to think about how landowners and farmers can be recompensed for the amount of money spent on clearing up other people’s waste. There needs to be greater support for the protection of landowners coupled with tougher penalties on perpetrators, such as seizing the vehicles used to fly-tip.

Having been a councillor for many years, I understand the role of local authorities and that some are more diligent than others in tackling the problem. Local authorities should make it easier for people to dispose of their waste legally at recycling centres. Sometimes their rules are inconsistent and unclear. Now is the time for these rules to be replaced with common sense and practical measures that enable people to recycle or dispose of their waste legally. This is a very serious issue and needs to be addressed urgently before the countryside becomes an unsightly dumping ground. I beg to move.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, on this amendment and thank her very much for her contribution. I also declare my interest as a landowner in Northumberland. I am not here to carp about the cost to me of doing this, more to carp about the inconvenience of finding your gateways blocked again and again, as well as the unpleasantness of this problem. It is often a really unpleasant thing to have to deal with.

Fly-tipping is a huge problem. It has got worse during the pandemic because a lot of local authorities closed their tips when there was social distancing of various kinds. The fly-tipping industry—if we can call it that—seems to have a sort of momentum behind it now, so even though those tips are open, it continues. On my farm, we experience this problem about once a week, to give you an idea of how bad it is. There is usually a chunk of leylandii hedge, a fridge, a cooker, some flooring, bits of clothing, toys, random chunks of concrete, lots of plastic, plenty of polystyrene packaging and some really unmentionable things as well.

If you are lucky, there is also a bank statement or a utility bill and this can be very helpful. However, when you go round and knock on the door of the person whose bank statement it is, they apologise profusely and, as the noble Baroness said, say, “I’m terribly sorry, we thought they were a legitimate waste disposal outfit”. That is, again and again, the problem that one encounters. There are plenty of rogues masquerading as legitimate waste disposal people. Surely it is possible to tackle that problem.

In our case, many of the tips are—because we keep our gates firmly locked—on the public highway side of the gate and they end up being the local authority’s problem to get rid of, not ours. All it takes is a couple of calls and a lot of inconvenience and it happens. As I said, I am not here to complain about the cost to me. It is £250 a time to hire a skip and it is a lot of work.

What would work extremely well, because this happens again and again in certain locations, is CCTV. But if you put up CCTV you have to put up a sign saying that you have put up CCTV, otherwise you cannot bring a prosecution based on it. Now, if you put up a sign saying that there is CCTV in a gateway, you are simply shifting the problem to somebody else’s gateway.

I worry that the cost of legitimately disposing of waste is too high and the inconvenience too great. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, touched on this as well. More effort needs to go into making it easier for households to find somewhere to dispose of their waste cheaply and easily. That would help a lot.

I think this amendment would help and it is right that landowners should not have to bear the cost of removing this stuff from their land, but further changes are necessary to alter the incentives and stop the dreadful nuisance created. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, in asking for further detail on what the Bill is likely to be able to enable, in terms of secondary legislation, to try to tackle this problem.

While I am on my feet, may I touch on one other issue? If you go for a walk on remote moorland in the Pennines, you encounter zero litter except one thing that you encounter on every walk and that is birthday balloons. They just appear all the time, but not in very large numbers. They are not terribly inconvenient and not so difficult to get rid of—you stuff them in your pocket—but it is upsetting in a beautiful landscape suddenly to find something shiny and bright purple. Well, purple is all right on a moorland—bright yellow, shall we say? It would be quite easy to ask the birthday balloon industry always to put an address on birthday balloons, so that I could send them back in a package.

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[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

It is quite rare that we have virtual unanimity around the Committee on something being a major problem, so I thank noble Lords for taking part in the debate.

On Amendments 123, 136, 137 and 138, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Harlington Mandeville, fly-tipping is a crime that affects all of society, including rural communities—perhaps mostly rural communities—and private landowners. We are committed to tackling this unacceptable behaviour. We appreciate the difficulties and costs that fly-tipping poses to landowners, as outlined by the noble Baroness and by my noble friend Lord Ridley. We are working with a wide range of interested parties, through the national fly-tipping prevention group, including with the NFU, to promote and disseminate good practice, including how to prevent fly-tipping on private land. I do appreciate the noble Lord’s suggestion on birthday balloons. I can assure him that I have not received any today—but my noble friend Lord Randall is absolutely right to mention the serious harm that Chinese lanterns can do to livestock.

In essence, we expect all local authorities to exercise their power to investigate fly-tipping incidents on private land, prosecuting the fly-tippers and recovering clearance costs where possible. As a number of noble Lords mentioned, with more people enjoying the outdoors than ever before with Covid, we have recently published an updated version of the Countryside Code in order to educate and help people enjoy the countryside in a safe and respectful way. I know how difficult it was, during Covid, when a number of local authority tips were closed, and I am sure that this increased the incidence of fly-tipping, particularly of large items.

In the Budget of 2020, we allocated up to £2 million to support innovative solutions to tackle fly-tipping. In April 2021, we commissioned a research project considering the drivers, the deterrents and the impacts of fly-tipping. This research project is due to be completed before the end of this year and will support informed policy-making. We are exploring additional funding opportunities and priorities, including considering the role of digital solutions, obviously including CCTV.

The measures in the Bill will grant greater enforcement powers and the ability to increase penalties in the future, which should help to reduce the incidence of both urban and rural fly-tipping. I should say here that Defra chairs the national fly-tipping prevention group, working with the NFU and others to share advice, and this group met in the spring.

My noble friend Lord Randall asked about fines. Local authorities have legal powers to take enforcement action against offenders. Anyone caught fly-tipping may be prosecuted, which can lead to a fine, up to 12 months’ imprisonment, or both, if convicted in a magistrates’ court. The offence can attract a fine, up to five years’ imprisonment, or both, if convicted in a Crown Court. I appreciate the difficulties of identifying some of the perpetrators of this crime. Instead of prosecuting, councils may choose to issue a fixed-penalty notice, an on-the-spot fine. Local authorities can issue fixed penalties of up to £400 to both fly-tippers and householders who pass their waste to an unlicensed waste carrier. Vehicles of those who are suspected of committing a waste crime, including fly-tipping, can be searched and seized.

As the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, suggested, waste transportation is in urgent need of an update. Waste tracking is still largely carried out using paper-based record-keeping. This makes it really difficult to track waste effectively, as it provides organised criminals with the opportunity to hide evidence of the systematic mishandling of waste, leading to fly-tipping. The Bill will tackle this by introducing a new electronic system for tracking waste movements through Clauses 57 and 58 and will provide enforcing authorities, including the regulator, with enhanced powers to enter premises. We will be consulting on the detail this summer.

In addition, powers in the Bill also allow for the “polluter pays” principle to cover costs associated with the unlawful disposal of products or materials, as set out in Schedule 5, Part 2. This includes the cost of removing littered or fly-tipped items, including from private land.

Measures in the Bill on deposit return schemes will also allow the deposit management organisation to use moneys received under a scheme for the protection of the environment, including to cover costs associated with the removal of littered or fly-tipped items currently borne by farmers or private landowners. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned the dreaded term “planned obsolescence” and made a very good point. Notable initiatives have recently got into the public vernacular, such as “The Repair Shop” and other ways of recycling, reusing and restoring materials. The “polluter pays” principle in Schedule 5 includes powers to make producers pay for managing products at the very end of their life, and the disposal vernacular should become “recycle and reuse”.

The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, also asked about costs of disposal. Waste disposal authorities may make only reasonable charges for waste disposal. We will review HWRC services and the Controlled Waste Regulations and, subject to consultation, we will amend them to ensure that they remain fit for purpose and that charges are fairly applied.

In conclusion, I thank the noble Baroness for bringing forward these amendments. I am afraid that I am unable to answer her point on illegal storage, but I will write to her on that specific issue. In the meantime, I hope I have reassured noble Lords that these amendments are not needed, and I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, and I thank the Minister for her response. I am encouraged that the Government are working with the NFU and other bodies to find solutions. Fly-tipping, as we have heard, is on the increase, and we have heard some very graphic descriptions of how this has affected landowners and farmers. It is, as the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, has said, a great inconvenience as well as very costly.

During the pandemic, the household waste recycling centres were indeed closed. When they reopened, there were huge queues around the corner. Unlike the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, householders in our area do not have to book a slot, and you can see what the queue is like on the website so that you can choose your time: usually a good time is about half an hour before it closes at 5 pm. So it is possible to access the HWRCs, but it is not easy.

The situation with CCTV signage is exceedingly unhelpful, and I ask the Government to look into this. It is a bit like having a sign for a speed limit: we get the sign saying that there is a speed camera, and by the time traffic reaches the camera, everybody has slowed down. If we are to have CCTV to prevent fly-tipping, I do not think we need signage to alert the perpetrators that it is on the way. As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said, there is an issue of natural justice here, and the need to crack down on criminals, especially organised criminals.

I was very concerned when the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said that he had had asbestos dumped on his land. That is an extremely toxic substance, and if householders find that they have some asbestos, perhaps on their roof, or in an extension, it costs them quite a lot to get rid of it at the household waste recycling centre. I wonder whether local authorities could think about reducing some of those costs, so that asbestos is not dumped but disposed of safely. It is outrageous that it should be dumped in the countryside, where it is a threat to animals and humans.

We have all made the point that there must be a shift from the landowner paying to the polluter paying. That has to happen as a matter of urgency. I welcome the Minister’s reassurance that there will be publicity around the Countryside Code. It could do with a bit of a relaunch, because I am sure people are not aware of how to behave in the countryside. More needs to be done to encourage local authorities to go for the maximum fixed penalty notice, instead of some derisory sum. I am grateful for all the contributions, and I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 123 withdrawn.

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I will not labour the point about polystyrene in construction, but I hope that my noble friend the Minister acknowledges that this is an area which needs urgent attention. I ask him to engage with BEIS and the housing department to seek solutions that get rid of all polystyrene in construction as soon as is practically possible. However, dealing with its use in food and packaging is an easy win, and I urge him to act on that and ban it before 1 January 2023. If he needs another year, I can live with that—I am a reasonable person after all.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendments 141 and 142 to 145, which are in my name. Amendment 141 relates to the plastic packaging tax, which was placed in law by this year’s Finance Bill and will come into effect next year. The tax is welcome in principle, but my amendment seeks to probe the Government on the detail. Manufacturers of innovative compostable packaging solutions are aghast that the tax makes no distinction between their products and old-fashioned polluting plastic. Members of the Bio-based and Biodegradable Industries Association have attempted to engage Ministers in Defra and the Treasury on this point but are hitting a brick wall, since the Government are interested only in a single threshold —namely, the amount of a given product that is recycled.

It is of course a fine public policy objective to encourage the use of recycled rather than virgin plastics, as the tax attempts to do, but that single criterion fails to recognise a few facts of life. First, packaging that is to come into contact with food cannot be recycled, for food hygiene reasons. Secondly, plastic films are extremely hard to recycle and, even if they are recycled, are seldom if ever recycled into new films. The idea of a circular economy on such packaging is just an illusion.

By contrast, compostable films can be an appropriate substitute and are more sustainable than conventional films from recycled sources. Compostable packaging can never contain 30% recycled content because its destined end of life is to disappear completely in the soil, leaving no microplastics behind. The unintended consequence of the tax as it stands is that these innovative solutions are perversely penalised.

The amendment asks the Government to recognise that treating independently certified compostable films as separate and distinct from conventional plastics would not create a free-for-all or a loophole. The compost quality protocol sets out clear safeguards for waste-derived compost, including by specifying that any compostable packaging and plastic wastes accepted must be independently certified to meet composting standards. Among these is BS EN 13432, referenced in the amendment, which is a strong, internationally accepted British and European standard for determining which bioplastics are industrially compostable or biodegradable when processed through anaerobic digestion or in-vessel composting. As I said in the debate on the first day in Committee, these materials are not a silver bullet but they are rightly recognised by the recent report Breaking the Plastic Wave as part of the picture when it comes to tackling plastic pollution.

Amendments 142 to 145 are related to Amendment 141. If we believe that compostable alternatives to conventional plastic have a place, particularly in food-contact packaging, it follows that we should make provision for those compostable materials to be collected so that the end-user knows that they are indeed composted. Alternatively, householders can mix them with their garden and kitchen compostable waste. As a consumer, it is baffling to pick up something that is labelled “compostable” if you have no obvious means of composting it.

The Bill rightly places in law the necessity for separate food waste collections, and my Amendments 142 to 145 simply seek to establish that independently certified compostable materials should be collected alongside this waste stream. The films that we are talking about here are of low density and can easily fit in a food-waste caddy. Indeed, in certain applications, such as the compostable bags containing bananas in Waitrose, the packaging can be used as a liner for a food caddy.

The present custom and practice of local authorities and their waste management firms is rather variable when it comes to these compostable items. Some faithfully ensure that compostable films are properly processed. Others actually strip out compostable items, treating them as contaminants. It cannot be right for consumers to be sold products that are compostable but for the waste management system to let them down at the end of the process by incinerating or landfilling these items. I shall refer to this issue in later amendments.

Approximately 45 composting plants in the UK are approved for composting inputs that include food waste at present, but the current network processes only 20% of what will be necessary from 2023 onwards. In consequence, much of the 80% extra capacity that must be built will be entirely new or revamped plants. Waste managers need a clear steer now that anaerobic digestion plants must have a composting phase in which compostable materials, such as BS EN 13432-certified packaging, are properly processed. Handling this issue properly has the potential to reduce the contamination of soil from normally polluting plastics, which is why it has the support of the National Farmers’ Union. With these amendments added to the Bill, it would be clear that as composting infrastructure is expanded across the UK, all composting plants must make provision for ensuring the proper processing of compostable packaging materials.

Finally, I turn to Amendments 130A, 130B and 141A, also in this group and capably moved and spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch. I fully support her in these amendments. As the adage goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Transparency about the sheer amount of plastic used by supermarkets would catalyse consumer pressure on the big players to kick their plastic habit. I commend the work that Iceland has done, which the Minister mentioned on our first day. The transparency clause in Amendments 130A and 130B would push other firms in a similar direction. The Minister will by now have received the message that I am not going away on this issue, and I look forward to his response.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, yet again, the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, makes a soft threat to the Minister about not going away, and I support her completely. This is a really interesting group of amendments, all incredibly sensible. I have signed, with delight and surprise, Amendment 140 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, but my noble friend Lady Bennett will speak to that and I will speak to the others.

We all know that banning the use of single-use plastic has been far too slow. Many Members of your Lordships’ House have mentioned this many times and urged the Government to do something about it. The Chief Whip is waving at me; he is probably telling me, “Go on! Go on!” We have to reduce the absurd amount of plastic we are still churning out every single day when we know the danger that promises. The Government keep on publishing plans and strategies and promises and consultations and all sorts of things, but nothing actually happens. We just have to do it.

I spoke previously about how plastics, and microplastics in particular, will in future be seen in a similar light to asbestos—a substance with miraculous properties but such a huge danger to health that it is phased out almost totally from general use. That is how I would like to see the future of plastic.

The Government and Parliament have vital roles in the transition away from mass plastic. Industry, PR and lobbyists will bleat on about industry-led transition, but this is just greenwashing most of the time. For as long as you can buy bananas wrapped in plastic, you can know that the industry claims are nonsense. I realise that Iceland has taken some huge steps and is an example to other similar supermarkets. I do not eat much from Iceland, but I do support its initiatives. Parliament has to legislate, and the Government have to lead.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, also raised compostable plastics. It is an important issue, not least because of the confusion they cause. Some are home compostable in a regular back garden compost heap and will completely break down into safe, organic matter. Others will not break down except in special conditions in an industrial compost facility. There is a whole public education issue there, and not even the waste authorities seem to have worked it out yet. There is no common ruling or understanding. It seems a real shame that compostable plastics are not being collected by council waste services and are, instead, wrongly going to landfill or contaminating the plastic recycling stream.

I hope the Government have a plan for this; it is one of many issues where central government absolutely must get a grip on local authority recycling services and set basic minimum standards across the country. This is something many of us have been asking for for a long time, and it is time the Government listened.

Lastly, the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, said at one point that the cheapest is not the best. Of course, the cheapest immediate option is often one of the most expensive if you look over its lifetime. He is absolutely right: the cheapest is not the best. We have to look at and understand the future repercussions of everything we do.