James Paice
Main Page: James Paice (Conservative - South East Cambridgeshire)Department Debates - View all James Paice's debates with the HM Treasury
(13 years, 4 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr James Paice)
I thank all the hon. Members who have contributed to this debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) suggests, I am surprised by some of the issues about which it has fallen to me to respond, and which have—at least for today—fallen under the DEFRA umbrella. I will do my utmost to respond to the points that have been made, in the order in which hon. Members spoke.
The hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead), whom I have always respected for his knowledge of waste and renewables policies, rightly raised the issue of landfill bans. I hope that he will understand that I answer on behalf of Lord Henley, who leads on this issue and is therefore far more acquainted with it than I am. We have immense sympathy with the hon. Gentleman—and in fact there is very little difference in what we are trying to achieve. I know that he chided us a little, and I will try to answer him, but we are trying to prioritise efforts to manage all our waste—not just domestic waste, but also industrial waste. We tend to concentrate on worrying about what councils do with domestic waste and ignore the wider issues of industrial waste, but we are trying to prioritise our efforts in line with the waste hierarchy and reduce the carbon impact of our waste, as well as considering what sort of inheritance we are leaving for future generations in terms of the contents of holes in the ground.
We are rightly concentrating on the higher levels of the hierarchy, including reducing waste in the first place, and then working through reuse, recycling and energy recovery before we end up at landfill. Clearly we want to move to a zero-waste economy in which all our material resources are fully valued or used in one way or another. The hon. Gentleman talked particularly about landfill, and I am sure the House will agree that landfill should be the option of last resort for most waste, especially for biodegradable waste.
We need to move towards eliminating landfill, and landfill volumes have fallen by a third in the last three years. That must be good news and the waste review, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, will play a substantial role in pushing wastes up the hierarchy and away from landfill. We are going further, and that is why we are maintaining landfill tax increases towards a floor of £80 per tonne in 2014-15.
On the specific issue of the consultation on restricting wood waste being sent to landfill, I can say from a personal perspective that I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is a huge waste of a valuable resource. There have been times when I have been known to fumble around some skips to fetch decent bits of timber out for a bit of DIY at home. I commend that approach to other hon. Members—if we all did our bit, perhaps we would not need to ban landfill.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the consultation that was begun under the previous Government—one of a number that they set in train in the last few weeks of their life and left to the new Government to resolve.
The Government were committed to a waste review, which is why we had to respond to the earlier consultation, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned. That consultation—on banning individual items from landfill—was very general, unlike the specific and more targeted consultation on wood waste, which we are talking about now. That consultation allows us to explore in much greater detail the practical implications of dealing with different types of wood. For instance, some wood waste might be treated with toxic materials that we cannot burn. There is a raft of issues. However, he raised a specific point about the previous consultation and criticised us for putting it in the archive. This is not an issue of secrecy; it is just where these things eventually belong. The DEFRA website has been refreshed over the past year under the new Government. The material has not been buried—or even put in landfill—but is freely available in the archive. I can assure him that we take this seriously.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) referred to the problem of roaming horses. I am sure that that is an issue of which most of us, whether we have urban or rural constituencies, have some understanding, although perhaps not in the fine detail to which he referred. He referred to fly-grazing—horses being chained on the verge. I suspect that virtually every Member has witnessed that and, if nothing else, questioned the welfare of those horses. He rightly listed the three pieces of legislation to which DEFRA Ministers usually refer—in fact, he virtually delivered my speech. I am not going to waste time, or insult him, by repeating them. He also rightly referred to the innovative use of other legislation, particularly by Dudley metropolitan borough council. I congratulate it on that sort of innovation; it is what we expect from local government. However, if he can think of other areas, we would be happy to consider them. He specifically referred to putting guidance online, and I am happy to consider that and respond to him when we have had time to reflect further.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) was not on my list of speakers—so, not for the first time, I will have to wing it. Fortunately, he spoke about a subject extremely close to my heart, and I could not disagree with any of his points about the value of country sports, not just to the country’s heritage, but to the economy and job creation. There was one important point that he did not make but which I feel strongly about: although country sports might provide only a handful of jobs in a particular area, in a rural area a handful of jobs can be very important. We need to understand that point. He referred to the racing industry. As he knows, I represent the area surrounding Newmarket, where about 7,000 jobs are dependent on the racing industry. I can assure him that the Government strongly support the continuity of country sports and recognise their economic contribution.
My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) had the good fortune to raise an issue that we have largely answered today already, so I hope that he will forgive me if I do not wax too lyrical about bovine TB, as it was discussed earlier in the Chamber. I would make one critical point, however. He spoke about the trauma to families of disease breakdown. For the past four years, more than a quarter of the herds in Devon have been under restriction at some time during the year. That is a huge proportion, and demonstrates just how bad the problem is in Devon. Unusually, he underestimated the seriousness of the situation. I think that he said that about 2,000 cattle were slaughtered in Devon, but the actual figure is 5,700. That, too, demonstrates the seriousness of the situation. I cannot tell him the location of the pilots because we have not got to that stage yet. We expect applications for licences to be made, but as I have said in the media today, I would be astonished if one of them was not in the south-west somewhere.
Mr Paice
Even I do not think that Shropshire is in the south-west. Two suitable sites will be selected.
My hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney) referred to the green belt. Let me make it absolutely clear that this Government will maintain the green belt, despite some spurious reports about how the national policy planning framework will weaken it. It will not. The Government have no intention of weakening the key protections for the green belt. Inappropriate development should not be approved in the green belt except in very special circumstances. This is a matter for local planning authorities, through the planning process. Clearly my hon. Friend has differences of opinion—on the face of it, it sounds as if I would entirely agree—with his local council about the number of houses. I need to stress, as he did, that our commitment to abolish regional spatial strategies means that there is absolutely no obligation for local authorities to pursue the planning policies that they may have been forced into by the previous Government. Local authorities can stop, as mine has, and start again if they so wish. I wish him success in persuading his local authority to do that.
Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) spoke about the bioethanol industry. In answer to his final point, the Department that is primarily responsible is the Department for Transport, as he probably knows. The Government strongly support the use of biofuels, as long as they are sustainable. The industry—particularly the ethanol sector, to which he referred—has done a considerable amount to improve its greenhouse gas savings. The latest data suggest that bioethanol from home-grown wheat and sugar beet achieved direct emissions savings of 60% and 77% respectively, compared with fossil fuels, which is a significant gain. However, there are concerns, particularly about the indirect effects of displacing food production, which is why sustainability is so important.
I can also assure my hon. Friend that we are looking carefully at the issue of tariffs, to which he referred. I fully understand what he was saying; it always amazes me that although the United States is very good at telling others to practise free trade, it then introduces its own domestic support—in this case for the ethanol sector, taking something like a third of the corn production in the United States for that purpose. As he said, other countries in the EU have not allowed the use of the chemical tariff for fuel ethanol, which attracts lower duty than the other categories. At present the British Government are examining the legality of that and looking into whether we can learn lessons from the approach taken by other EU countries. Let me conclude by assuring my hon. Friend that we support the domestic bioethanol industry, which has shown the way forward. Clearly sustainability is at the heart of it, but so too is fair and free trade. We must ensure that that does not work against our own domestic industry.
I thank you for the opportunity to respond on DEFRA issues, Mr Deputy Speaker. I wish you and all Members of the House present a very pleasant summer recess.
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