Recycling of Tyres

Leigh Ingham Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mary Creagh)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. What a joy it is to be back in Westminster Hall to discuss everybody’s favourite subjects: the materials economy, waste crime, and how we are going to tackle waste crime, after a decade and a half of a lot of talk and very little action—as the Elvis Presley song goes. We will have a little more action under this Government. As part of our plan for change, we will clean up Britain, crack down on waste cowboys and close the waste loopholes. I am keen that we all work together on a cross-party basis to achieve that.

[Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)]

Waste cowboys have been a big issue around the villages of my constituency, as I have said previously. I appreciate the Government’s focus on the circular economy, particularly from the Minister, because I know that she is incredibly passionate about this issue. Does she agree that the focus on our circular economy is important not only for the environment, but to tackle the criminality around fly tipping and other areas of waste crime?

[Mary Creagh]

I do indeed. The amount of money and resources allocated to tackling environmental crime was steadily reduced over the term of the previous Government. There has been a sense that these are somehow victimless crimes. I listened to the “File on 4” documentary, and it was deeply upsetting to hear about the fire and the death of local people at that plant. There is always a victim. There is no such place as “away”. We have only one world, and we have to stop treating our rivers, lakes and seas as sewers, and stop outsourcing our material problems to other countries.