Waste Collection Services

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord will probably be aware that in the Budget speech the Chancellor announced that we will look at how we can tackle that problem, perhaps through taxation on single-use plastics. He is right that bottles are a challenge. However, we should not beat ourselves up too much: in 2000, 13,000 tonnes of plastic bottles were recycled; by 2016, it was 343,000 tonnes. There is much to do but we are on track.

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, will my noble friend say what the Government are doing to encourage local authorities to have greater consistency of approach in recycling?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the hallmark of what we do is to say that local residents should be involved and should give their views on recycling—that is important. That said, good practice is outlined in the litter strategy, and there is a litter innovation group that considers bids for attractive and innovative ways of tackling this. So, although consistency is important, there are individual ideas that we should encourage so that other local authorities can pick them up. Recycling rates vary enormously. The best-performing area in England is South Oxfordshire, with 66%. There are challenges in some of the urban areas. I can see that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, is anxious to get to his feet—it might apply to Southwark, goodness knows, but I will not single out local authorities to shame them.