Taxation: Silage Film

Debate between Douglas Ross and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 18th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, with which I entirely agree. It is not a point that the Government have ever challenged in the past. Only last year, the Environment Agency published a paper on the positions and technical interpretations in respect of responsibility for packaging. On page 31, the document accepts that the primary function of silage wrap is producing the product. I accept that it is a different Government Department, but it has accepted that the primary function of silage wrap is to produce silage, not to package, store or protect it. The Minister may argue that that is a different Department and that it is not Treasury policy, but we are trying, on a cross-Government basis, to reduce the amount of plastic that is used and encourage the use of recycled plastic and of recycling. We have measures coming in to make the producer pay for the collection and recycling of their packaging material through the whole system. It seems bizarre that the Treasury, HMRC and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have different definitions of what counts as packaging in that situation. People come under one set of rules but not the other, even though they are charging for similar sorts of things. I hope that we can achieve consistency across Government.

If the Minister is not convinced by that compelling argument for consistency across Government, I refer her to a 2018 HM Treasury consultation on tackling the plastic problem that concluded that silage film came into the category of non-packaging plastics. Even the Treasury has, in the past, accepted that silage film is not a packaging plastic. I therefore hope that there is no doubt that the primary purpose here is not simple packaging. Looking through the list of items that fall inside and outside this tax, one of the general themes is the primary purpose of the plastic. It is hard to see from that list why silage film has been treated inconsistently with other plastics that are excluded.

My second contention is that what has been done here is contrary to the policy intent. The guidance notes set out that the plastic packaging tax was designed to encourage to the use of recycled plastic instead of new plastic material in plastic packaging. In turn, the tax would create demand for recycled plastic and stimulate increased recycling and collection of plastic waste, diverting it from landfill or incineration. That is the Government’s own stated intent. Because of the very specialised nature of the film––which has to be incredibly thin, light-proof and waterproof, and capable of achieving those things when being used for wrapping in a farm setting––the industry and farming lobbying bodies are absolutely clear that there is no way any level of recycled plastic can be used in that film with current technology and achieve the effect needed for the fermentation of grass. No matter what this tax is from 1 April, there will not be any quantity of recycled plastic incorporated in the film, as that is not technologically possible at the moment. Therefore, including silage film in this tax will not generate increased use of recycled plastic; it will simply be a tax on farmers that they can barely afford to pay, given their current situation.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and for his well-researched and detailed speech. I should also declare an interest; although I am no longer a farmer, before I came to this place I was involved in farming, and silage is an integral part of farming across the United Kingdom.

I am here today to express the views of the National Farmers Union of Scotland, which has made many of the points that my hon. Friend has made today. On recycling, does he accept that agriculture accounts for only 3% of plastic use across the United Kingdom, that silage film is just a small proportion of that, and therefore that we are seemingly taking a sledgehammer to crack a very small nut here?

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I agree with him.

I was trying to establish that levying this tax would not actually increase recycling, because silage film cannot include any recycled components. In fact, the tax may make the recycling situation worse, because there have long been efforts to get a collection scheme in place for this waste. It is obviously expensive to go and collect the film from every single farm; it becomes hugely dirty, and collecting it is not cheap.

In recent years, a voluntary scheme has been put in place to collect this plastic so that it can be recycled. That has a cost to farmers of about £60 a tonne. The impact of charging farmers £200 a tonne to get the plastic in the first place will be that they will not be able to afford the £60 a tonne for collection, so we will end up with lower levels of recycling; the farmers just will not pay for collection, so there will not be a collection and the plastic will not be recycled. Consequently, as a result of the tax, we will end up with less recycling of plastic than we have now.

I am sure that the Government’s sincere aim is to have more recycling of plastic. However, by far the best approach would be not to include this film in the taxation regime but instead to try to support the voluntary scheme, to get as much of this stuff collected as we can. It is actually very recyclable, making it very valuable; it can be recycled and reused in other products, including those made in my constituency.

My third argument was that silage film would not fall within the definitions set out in section 48 of the Finance Act 2021, which defines a “packaging component” as

“a product that is designed to be suitable for use…in the containment, protection, handling, delivery or presentation of goods at any stage in the supply chain of the goods from the producer of the goods to the user or consumer.”

What happens with silage film is that the grass and so on is mown and harvested in the field, and it is then wrapped in the field, stored on the farm and subsequently fed to the farmer’s animals in the winter season.

I am not sure whether it is possible to call grass that has been stored and fermented “goods”. It is not sold to anybody, it does not leave the farm, and there is no “supply chain” for it at all. It is not packaged to be moved, presented or anything else; it is basically just there to be fermented. Once it has fermented, the plastic is taken off and the silage, as it is now, is fed to the animals on that farm. I am not sure how it can be said that there is a “supply chain” for silage when the grass never leaves the farm. It therefore looks to me, on first principles, that the published guidance of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is not consistent with the law that Parliament passed last year.

The irony, of course, is that the Government have had to introduce a statutory instrument—I think that it is S.I. 2021, No. 1417—to modify the law that we have introduced but that has not yet come into force, in order to try to be clear about what we intended to catch in this situation. I do not have any criticism of that. This is a whole new tax; we want to get it right, and it is more important for us to get it right than to be precious about not correcting our own law. I therefore fully support those changes.

However, the guidance note for the changes sets out, in paragraph 7.4:

“This is to ensure that the tax applies to products which are primarily packaging rather than products whose function as packaging is incidental to their main purpose”.

So the Government are introducing changes to section 48 of the Finance Act 2021 to exclude products whose primary purpose is not packaging; indeed, the packaging is

“incidental to their main purpose”.

Therefore, it seems entirely clear to me that what the Government have been trying to do in clarifying the law in that statutory instrument is exactly what I am arguing for silage film; I argue that it meets the definition in the guidance note of the sort of product that should not be caught by this tax.

It would be far better for all concerned if we clarified that now and had HMRC guidance that was, in my view, consistent with the law, rather than having to resort to litigation and tribunals to establish whether this tax should be collected. If that happened, we may end up with some manufacturers thinking that the tax was not due and not charging it, and some manufacturers taking the other view, and it may have to be resolved by the courts in a few years’ time. I would hope that we could get that clarified now, just over two months before the tax comes into force, so that we have certainty.

My final contention is about the impact of the tax on farmers at a difficult time for them. According to estimates, I think from the National Farmers Union or its Northern Irish counterpart, the £200 per tonne would increase the cost of silage film by roughly 10%—a cost that farmers’ rivals around the world, from where we import much meat, do not have to bear. That would be a blow to our farmers’ competitiveness against their international rivals. It would increase their cost base when they are already struggling, as many businesses are in the current economic climate. As I said, that is just a straight-through cost. There is no way of changing the formulation of silage film to avoid the cost by making it 30% recycled components. That cannot be done. It is just a straight cost for farmers, which is not what this tax was intended to achieve.

I therefore hope, on the basis of all of those arguments, that the Minister can give us some encouraging noises. It was never raised that silage film would be in the scope of the tax in any of the consultations, previous lists of products or discussions with the industry. I hope that the Minister can accept that adding it at a late stage was incorrect and was not appropriate. Its inclusion is inconsistent with the law, will not achieve the purpose of the tax and will be an unnecessary burden on farmers. I look forward to hearing her remarks.