Draft Waste Enforcement (England and Wales) Regulations 2018

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2018 General Committees

[Dr Drew]

I would argue that we are far too lax in our control of bonfires. I could add a fourth thing that people moan about: people setting fire to their garden waste next door. Given that in many authorities—including mine—there are ways to dispose of garden waste, to me, bonfires are an idle way of dealing with it.

On dioxins and furans, which come out of incineration, my argument is that we are not properly checking that. We are somewhat ignorant about particulates and what they end up doing; they do come down somewhere, because their nature is to reassemble themselves. We are not necessarily talking about incineration here, but I am just using it as an example of why we have to be very careful about what we collect and what we do with it, because in this country we are not very good at deciding what we are doing.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Is not the whole point of having a waste hierarchy that at the top of it is reducing waste from occurring in the first place? Then we try to recycle and reuse. Even anaerobic digestion allows us to produce energy from waste. Incineration is right at the bottom of the pile, before landfill, because it does not make any good use of those precious resources.

[Dr Drew]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. Whenever we talk about waste in this place, it is right that we critique what we are doing and ask whether we can do it better. I could go on about how this building operates. I found out through parliamentary questions that we are not that good in how we dispose of our rubbish—out of sight, out of mind. If we cannot get it right in this place, how can we expect the Great British public to take waste more seriously?

I would like the Minister to explain in more detail the difference between what is unlawful and what is undesirable; that may be the argument that is considered when someone is thinking about whether they are responsible for removing certain waste. Take the example of a farmer who has had waste tipped on their land. It has been there some time, because it is difficult to remove. At what stage in the 21 days has it become unlawful? Is the onus entirely on the landowner then to remove it, pay for it and take precautionary measures to stop it from happening again? That is what was discussed in the bit of the meeting that I was in yesterday. We all know from going around the countryside that there are now more fields with boulders at the gates. That is about stopping people from getting access to the fields and, more particularly, stopping people from fly-tipping. That is an ever-present and difficult problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kerry McCarthy]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I, too, welcome the Government’s taking action on this matter, but I question why it has taken so long to introduce the proposals. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs conducted a public consultation in 2015 on proposals to tighten regulators’ powers at waste sites, and the vast majority of the respondents agreed with the proposals. One would have thought that that meant that we could move ahead speedily. For some reason—I am not sure why—the Department conducted a restricted stakeholder consultation on this statutory instrument in April 2017, and the results were not published. I understand that of the 113 organisations that responded to the original consultation, only eight replied to the 2017 consultation. Perhaps they felt that they had already had their say and did not need to make a further contribution—or the issue may have been that it was a restricted, four-week consultation over Easter, and they did not have time to reply before the deadline. In the interests of ensuring that we can introduce similar legislation more speedily and efficiently in future, I would be grateful if the Minister could explain why this measure has taken so long to come to the table.

On the broader issue, fly-tipping and waste crime are a growing problem, as the Minister will know from discussions that she has had when appearing before the Environmental Audit Committee, particularly when we were looking at the problem of China enforcing a ban on the substantial amounts of plastic and paper waste that we were previously exporting to them. We were exporting the problem, some people might say, but the simple fact is that we are not equipped in this country; we do not have the infrastructure to recycle our own waste and use it sustainably, whether that be through reuse programmes or anaerobic digestion, ideally, or through, as a last resort, sending it to landfill. We should not be doing that. I think that the Minister now accepts that we need considerably more investment in infrastructure if we are to adhere to the waste hierarchy and deal with our waste sustainably.

Any MP, whether they have a rural or an urban constituency, will be aware of the blight of fly-tipping. In my constituency, under the M32 flyover, we have a significant problem with vans coming off the motorway and dumping refuse, usually from household clearance. One problem is that Bristol, quite rightly, reserves its household recycling centres for the use of Bristol residents, so people have to prove that they are a local council tax payer to use them. People in South Gloucestershire who want to use those sites are basically not allowed to do so, but unscrupulous firms will collect people’s waste under the pretence that they will dispose of it responsibly, and will just come off the motorway and dump it in the street. Although the waste has not been generated by Bristol households, it is the responsibility of Bristol City Council to clean it up. We have persistent complaints from councillors about that. It is a huge cost to the local council. People might say that we could make the recycling centres open to everyone, but why should we pay to dispose of things that South Gloucestershire residents want to get rid of?

Companies are meant to have waste licences to collect waste. There is a real problem with lack of enforcement in respect of those licences. Many companies are not licensed to do the job, but the average householder will not know whether a company is licensed, and will not even think to check whether someone has a licence. The Minister needs to address that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West spoke about the fly infestation in Avonmouth. He was not in Parliament in the time, and it is not my constituency, but that certainly caused a lot of concern locally. I think it started with a bale of biofuel, and it spread all across the local area, including to food waste bins. Eventually, the Environment Agency stripped the company in question of permission to operate on the docks. However, that took a long time to highlight. Viridor said at the time that it was

“yet another example of poor practice in RDF export.”

I have already mentioned China’s ban on our sending much of our waste there. I hope that the Minister will look at whether there is a risk that the plastic waste previously sent to China will be diverted to refuse-derived fuel in this country instead. I hope she will assure us that that will not be the case.

Finally, it is one thing to bring in measures—I welcome them—to deal with waste and fly-tipping, but the starting point should be preventing the waste. We heard lots of noise from the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about bringing forward a deposit return scheme, for example. In the Budget last year, it hit the front pages that we were consulting on a tax on single-use plastics. So far as I know, the call for evidence on that has still not even been issued, so a consultation that was on the front pages in November has not yet started. What is the delay?

Why can we not get on with being serious about the circular economy in this country, reducing waste and enforcing the waste hierarchy? Perhaps then we would not have so much waste to clear up.