Single Use Carrier Bags Charges (England) (Amendment) Order 2021.

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Grand Committee

[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 In the draft guidance to retailers on the reporting and record-keeping requirements, there is a section which states that if you are part of a franchise model, whether you report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?