Waste Incinerators

James Naish Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Steve Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I welcome the debate called by the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker); it highlights the cross-party consensus in opposing further incinerators.

In terms of the Wisbech incinerator, it is remarkable that an application to build an incinerator half the size was rejected in the local authority next door, so the response of developers was to double the size in order to make it a nationally significant infrastructure project, to get out of the local planning rules; to put it next to the biggest school in the district—only 700 metres away; to take waste from six different counties, all on small roads in a rural market town; and to have a chimney bigger than Ely cathedral in the flat landscape of the Fens. One can understand why so many people share my concern with the proposal.

I do not want to repeat the very good points that colleagues have made. I want to highlight two new points that the debate has not highlighted so far, which I hope will help Opposition and Government Members and support my own case in empowering the Minister. First, I will cite the Government’s own figures. On 30 December —quite recently—the Government’s own analysis showed that as of 2024 there was already 20.6 megatonnes of residual waste infrastructure capacity in England, of which 14.3 megatonnes was incineration. To put that in plain language, we already have enough incinerator capacity today to deal with the amount of waste that was projected in 2023 to arise by 2035—19.4 megatonnes of residual municipal waste. In other words, our existing capacity, at over 20 megatonnes, is more than we will need in just nine years’ time.

My first question to the Minister is whether DEFRA will commit to publishing analysis assessing the environmental damage of building incinerators, such as the huge incinerator at Wisbech, against the fact that they will be surplus to requirements in as little as nine years’ time. In other words, it will three years to build the incinerator, and after six years of operation it will be additional capacity to what we will need. We therefore need to assess how those two things compare.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Member agree that a sense of where incinerators are located around the country would be helpful, so that we could see the demand for incineration versus the capacity? That might reveal oversupply in certain parts of the country.

[Steve Barclay]

That is a fair point, which is addressed in DEFRA’s December paper. But as my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) highlighted, there are two at Huntingdon, another at Peterborough and two at Boston. There is already a concentration, so I do not accept the point about the east of England in that paper. My point is that we need to see analysis from DEFRA around the bridging issue for the next few years as the Government meet their legal target to reduce the amount of waste by 50% between 2019 and 2042. The amount of residual waste is coming down and we already have sufficient capacity, but there is a bridging issue. There will be short-term options around landfill refuse-derived fuel exports. We need to look at the respective merits of building huge incinerators and the damage that they will do compared with the short-term bridging options.

The second point is that the waste mix has changed. That was a feature of the BBC report that the hon. Member for Derby South highlighted. Burning food waste produces less CO₂ than putting it in landfill, but burning plastics produces 175 times more carbon dioxide than burying it. The reason that that matters—to my first point about bridging—is that the mix going into incineration has fundamentally changed from when the planning rules were initially put in place. What we have seen, and what the BBC highlighted, is an increase in food waste being dealt with through anaerobic digestion. As the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) pointed out, the predominant waste now going to incineration is plastics. It is the burning of plastics that drives the environmental damage, and that is why the hon. Member for Derby South correctly pointed out that it is the dirtiest way that the UK generates power.

My second question is whether the Minister will commit to publishing a composition analysis study of the residual waste treated at energy recovery facilities, as I asked for in a written question on 16 October. DEFRA has confirmed that it is undertaking a composition analysis study, but it was not published with the December analysis. Will the Minister commit to publishing that, so that we can see where the waste is going? Again, that fundamentally changes the environmental case around incineration.