Edmonton EcoPark: Proposed Expansion

Catherine West Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to contribute to this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) on securing the debate and on his outspokenness on this matter, as well as the work he has done on trying to achieve a solution with the Treasury. It is a pleasure to hear from my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who has a record going back to the 1970s as a local councillor in Haringey; he is known for his work in the areas of recycling, cycling and generally standing up for a more sustainable planet.

It is also a pleasure to hear from the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on air pollution, my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), who has talked about his outstanding work in Swansea West and beyond, responding to the challenges presented by COP26 and calling for us to be a bit more ambitious and a bit braver on incinerators. This feels like old technology, and that is why I am pleased that Haringey was the only borough that voted to pause and review when it came to the vote on the bid for the scheme.

I want to put on the record our memory of seven-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah, who tragically died from air pollution poisoning, as was found subsequently. Her mother, Rosamund, who spoke in this House on health and safety day, has spoken powerfully about how she took Ella’s case to the coroner to have the way that she passed away looked at. Ella was the first person to be formally found to have passed away from air pollution in the UK, and that was put on her death certificate posthumously.

I also want to put on the record that we in this House are all aware that air pollution does not affect us all equally. Pregnant women, babies and children, older people, people with lung conditions and those living in the poorest areas and in ethnically diverse communities are particularly at risk. I want to mention my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor), who worked as a health professional before coming into this House, and also my Haringey colleague, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who has led on a number of issues to do with ethnically diverse communities and their exposure to pollution, as well as the high numbers of our constituents who suffer from lung conditions. We know that 88% of people with a lung condition are affected by air pollution, and 58% of people with asthma have their condition triggered by air pollution. That is the context of today’s debate.

When the plans were first signed off, when the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) was the Mayor of London, the solution might have been okay, but that was a long time ago and things have moved on. It feels as though the project has not had the COP26 test applied to it, and now would be a good time for the Government to look again and challenge whether there is more that can be done. In particular, with the introduction of the green bonds, this might be a good time to explain exactly how they work—there does not seem to be a proper explanation of that—and to see how the project could introduce some best practice around the green agenda.

We are in a climate emergency, and our constituents want change. They want to recycle more and they want our polluted air to be cleaner. They are anxious that the size of the incinerator will mean there is an incentive to produce more waste in order to feed the associated district energy network. They are concerned about the environmental impact of incineration and the emissions that that process creates. They want 21st-century solutions to the management of waste that do not harm the health of residents or our environment.

Our constituents know that it is the poorest areas that pay the heaviest price, and there is real disappointment about the fact that the request for a pause and review was unsuccessful and the contract has now been awarded. It is vital that the design properly recognises the advances that we all expect to see in carbon capture and storage so that it is ready and equipped to take full advantage of them. Haringey’s council leader has urged the North London Waste Authority to bring forward the carbon capture and storage element of the plant so that it is operational as soon as possible to reduce CO₂ emissions, and I fully support her in that goal.

It is important to say that it is very difficult for local authorities to be innovative when they have had cuts of up to 50% to their budgets. Collectively, the eight local authorities’ budgets have been cut back enormously since 2010. The Government have failed to fund local authorities properly for the past 11 years and failed to be ambitious in their approach to waste. I urge the Government to work with the North London Waste Authority and our communities to radically increase recycling levels and to meet and beat the Mayor of London’s target of 50% by 2030.

The other measures that the Mayor of London has introduced around expanding the congestion charge and the ULEZ are painful for many of London’s motorists. It seems that the project that we are debating could make a very big difference with one installation, so it is a pity that we have not looked at its impact on making our air cleaner, as we desire to do.

It is vital to recognise the environmental and health impacts of incineration, but also to make sure that we do not simply push the problem out of London by transporting the capital’s waste to other parts of the UK or overseas. As other Members have mentioned, it would be unenviable to see waste from other parts of London coming back to London because there is capacity in this incinerator. Not only would that be bad for the environment, but it would be socially unjust.

I will conclude with this: all of us in this House care deeply about cleaner air, and about the new information we have regarding the impact of air pollution on asthma sufferers and others with lung conditions. I hope that the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), and the Minister will work to ensure that we belatedly get the best possible outcome for our north London constituents.

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Wood Green—

[Catherine West]

Woodford Green.

[Dr Whitehead]

Sorry, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). My office companion is my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), so that is on my mind all the time, as it should be. I need to get my nomenclature absolutely straight.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green on having secured today’s debate. The debate appears to be about a specific incinerator in a specific place with specific proposals for its extension, but it encapsulates much wider questions: how do we deal with our waste in modern times, and what are the best ways of dealing with it and, indeed, the energy that might come from it? By examining those wider questions, we loop back to the best thing to do with the North London Waste Authority, and the Edmonton incinerator in particular.

The first thing that is important in addressing this modern debate is to recognise—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) has correctly pointed out—that although we have been talking about waste this afternoon, we should not be talking about it in this way, because the vast majority of waste is actually a resource. In the context of the modern circular economy, the idea that we place a material that we have used into a stream, and then it is gone out of the system one way or another—it used to be buried; now it is incinerated—is clearly not appropriate if we regard that waste primarily as a resource. The duty of authorities dealing with waste should be to make sure that as much of that resource as possible can be recovered for use elsewhere, one way or another.