Plastic Bottles and Coffee Cups

Paul Beresford Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) on securing this debate. Incidentally, all the chopsticks that are used in my home are reusable and washed, and most have been going for around 30 years. This debate is overdue; I say that having read some years ago about the difficulties they have had with rubbish on Mount Everest. There was a report last week about a plastic bag found at the bottom of one our deepest ocean ravines. And there is just everything in between.

I shall use the few minutes available to draw Members’ attention to the previously mentioned report on the Palace of Westminster’s efforts—like it or lump it, it has now been through the system—to get rid of single-issue and single-use plastics, to the best of our ability. An extensive action paper on the issue was accepted by the Administration Committee, and it was accepted by the House of Commons Commission on Monday. Last week, it was accepted by the equivalent Committees in the other place.

I congratulate and thank the officials who took up the challenge on our behalf and who were exceptionally imaginative in their ideas. As many Members will be aware, we now have a progressive programme to remove single-use plastics. It is going to take us around 12 months. I wrote a letter to every Member to explain it, which means that around a 10th of them have read it. I expect complaints and so on; if Members who are oriented the right way receive complaints, can they put them down and thereby save me from having to respond?

All the usual single-use plastics culprits will go. I can assure the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) that water will be provided from taps, instead of in plastic bottles, the use of which will stop. There will be a tariff on single-use coffee cups. This, of course, is to bully coffee and tea drinkers into using reusable mugs. Disposable catering items, which will remain for a while at least, will be replaced with those made of compostable materials. Some of these items will strike us as being really quite unusual and new. For example, salads and similar are currently presented in clear plastic containers. The new ones will look the same, but our officials have discovered a source of compostable plastic, which was produced—I think—in only 2015. We will certainly test it and see how it goes.

The team looked beyond catering. Plastic bags will be replaced by paper bags. We are implementing a green stationery catalogue. A pilot scheme for reusing packaging for deliveries has commenced. The volume of waste of single-use plastic of delivered goods here is unbelievable. The list of things to do is not endless, but it is long, so I will not be tempted, in the time that I have available, to go through it with all the figures.

Interestingly, the parliamentary Environment Team is now looking at the environmental cost of other materials that we use and comparing and contrasting them. In other words, it is a case of watch this space: we have started and we are on our way. I am an ethnic minority immigrant, as my accent says. I come from a small country, which can be environmentally friendly to the degree of being paranoid. Our approach in the Houses of Parliament now fits that approach, and so it should.