Waste Incineration: Regulation

Debate between Priti Patel and Thérèse Coffey

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Dr Coffey]

The hon. Member for Keighley has suggested an incineration tax previously. As he pointed out, tax policy is generally a matter for the Treasury. Although energy from waste can play an important role in reducing the amount of waste going to landfill, in the long term we want to maximise the amount of waste used for recycling. Again, wider policies are set out in our resources and waste strategy. Changes that we will introduce to the extent of producer responsibility will effectively incentivise the design of products that are much more straightforward to recycle.

That is an opportunity, but I am also aware that industry and the Environmental Services Association are concerned that, if we do not reach 65% in that time or do not make progress more quickly, there will be a lack of incineration. In effect, that will be a commercial decision for them to consider, but, as was mentioned earlier, we want to encourage the use of the heat that plants produce, and to work closely with industry to secure a substantial increase in the number of energy from waste plants that are formally recognised as achieving recovery status R1. We will ensure that all future EfW plants achieve recovery status.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) rightly talked about transparent information for residents. I am conscious that some environmental assessments are very technical. That is why we have the Environment Agency to make that judgment. However, there is still an opportunity for residents to table questions either directly to the developer or to the Environment Agency during its consideration.

[Priti Patel]

Will the Minister give way?

[Dr Coffey]

I am just trying to get through all the different points. My hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami) rightly talked about the local community, but he should be aware that most such plants are dealt with through local planning. They tend to be in the local plan, so it is important that we challenge those different elements during the consideration.

I am conscious that two people want to intervene. I invite the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) to do so first.

Debate on the Address

Debate between Priti Patel and Thérèse Coffey

Wednesday 9th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas). I listened to his speech with great interest.

I shall focus on three specific sets of proposals in the Queen’s Speech that build on many of the strong reforms the Government introduced in the previous Session: the measures on children and families—which my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) has already touched on—crime and the courts, and enterprise and regulatory reform.

As a Conservative, I believe in stronger families forming the foundation of a stronger society, so I welcome the measures to support families. As my hon. Friend said, arranging child care is one of the biggest challenges working parents face. Those of us who daily do the school run know all about the pressures of juggling child care commitments with work. For households in which both parents are working, that can be a great struggle. Whether in respect of babysitting toddlers, looking after unwell children, doing the school run or attending school assembly, it can be very difficult for working mums and dads, especially those in traditional working arrangements, to support their children fully and meet their needs. We must not forget that young children—whether attending nursery, pre-school or school—have active lives and social lives, too, and that there are therefore also other commitments such as taking kids to after-school activities

Many households now need two parents to be working and bringing in full-time incomes in order to pay the bills because—let us face it—life is tough at the moment and the cost of living is high and is rising. Many Members have spoken about the rising utilities and fuel bills.

Suitable child care provision in this country is incredibly costly. Many of us could give examples of the average bill for sending a child to nursery in normal working hours exceeding £800 a month. That is equivalent to a monthly mortgage repayment in some households, so is it any wonder that two parents have to go out to work to cover child care costs in addition to the cost of living?

The Government are to be congratulated on recognising the challenges families face and the barriers to family life in this country, but more needs to be done across government and all the political parties. We must take a pragmatic and rational approach and introduce some positive, proactive measures to alleviate the struggles and challenges families face and to remove the barriers that are often in place in respect of child care and employment.

I know that many households across the country, and certainly in my constituency, will welcome the proposals outlined today. We need to give parents more flexibility over working time and over maternity and paternity leave, too. I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I was one of those parents who went back to work three weeks after having my son and, quite frankly, had I had the opportunity to swap with my husband, that really would have been great.

The Government should be commended for considering relationships between children and both parents. Fathers should absolutely have equal, fair and the right kind of access to their children when the family relationship has broken down. In my time as a Member of Parliament thus far, brief though it has been, many fathers have come to me who feel that their children are being used in the court system as an emotional and financial weapon, which is unacceptable. We need to bring some sanity back to the situation. Shared parenting is absolutely the right thing and, if nothing else, we have to start putting the rights of children first, not the rights of warring parents or warring mothers against warring fathers. Children come first and children’s rights are key.

That brings me on to adoption. In my view, the Government should be congratulated on their commitment to supporting the adoption process. I personally feel that it is nothing short of scandalous that the number of adoptions last year totalled just 60 when thousands of children are going through the care system in local authorities up and down the country. That is simply wrong. They deserve loving families and loving homes and hundreds of loving families want to provide good, stable homes for children. It is a shame on our society and on the system that red tape and bureaucracy get in the way and prevent children from being put into loving families. I welcome the change and hope that the Government will ensure that we can start to address the scandal and start to put children into proper loving homes.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dover talked about bureaucracy and red tape and I welcome the steps being taken to support children with special educational needs. As a local MP I have met dozens of families who have been let down by the system. Those mums and dads naturally want the best for their children but all too often bureaucracy, officialdom and, sometimes, bad practice in schools and local authorities let them down and damage the prospects of their children. They are left fighting hard, going through assessment after assessment, just to get the extra help that their children need. More often than not, in many cases, the needs of their children are recorded or summarised through some sort of tick-box process. The real understanding of the emotional or physical needs of the child is often ignored.

One school in my constituency has a very poor record on special educational needs provision and is the source of many complaints from parents to me. Rather than helping an autistic child, the school has classified him as having average communication skills. It is completely failing that poor child and failing to understand his needs because the school does not want to be seen to have too many children with special educational needs on its books, which is wrong and appalling. I would like more to be done to empower parents and I welcome the proposals to do that and to simplify the assessment process with the introduction of the single assessment process and education, health and care plans.

We also need to encourage the spread of best practice to get good results in the running of special educational needs services in other schools. A very positive example of that in my constituency is set by the inspirational head teacher, Jane Bass, at Powers Hall junior school in Witham. She sets a good leadership example and works tirelessly to help children with learning difficulties and special educational needs. I think she should be commended for her work. She has a strong track record of supporting children who have come to her school with very challenging problems and seeing them through their time there so that they leave with more skills and greater independence. That is good for the children and is genuine relief for their parents. Importantly, the parents know that their children’s needs are being met. In taking through the relevant Bill that will be introduced this Session, we should learn from schools that have a good track record of working with children and their parents to understand how to meet a child’s needs and relate that to the legislation. We need more head teachers like Jane Bass and I am optimistic that the legislative programme can deliver positive changes to special educational needs provision.

I welcome the Government’s tough stance on drug drivers, which I hope will lead to robust legislation. It is shameful that our criminal justice system sentences perpetrators for these offences—people who have taken away lives and ruined the lives of victims’ families—to just a few weeks behind prison bars instead of the lengthy spells in prison totalling many years that they should receive. I know that Ministers have listened closely to people’s concerns about this issue. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister today spoke about the many representations from families that he has listened to and the campaigns fought by victims’ families. Clearly, the Government have responded positively to those representations, but many more victims of other crimes have been excluded by the criminal justice system. Ministers need to listen to their concerns and introduce positive changes.

Victims and the public are being put in danger by a criminal justice system that, from the top down, sets free far too many offenders so that they end up roaming our streets and committing more crimes. There are more than 250 offenders with more than 100 convictions, more than 3,500 with 50 or more convictions and more than 2,000 offenders who have served 25 or more separate spells in prison. In addition, there are rapists and sex offenders who are never sentenced to serve a day behind bars. That should change. Some 20,000 offenders who are let off with community orders are out on the streets committing 50 crimes a day, including offences against children. The Government’s reforms to community sentences are a positive step forward, but there are tens of thousands of offenders on our streets for whom prison is the best place. Importantly, if they are in prison the public will know that they are being kept safe. Keeping the public safe should be fundamental to any criminal justice reforms we make in this Session.

We should also do more to support the victims of crime. I have seen from the work I have done with victims—let me refer hon. Members to my private Member’s Bill in the previous Session on championing victims’ rights—that victims are fed up with seeing policy makers and the courts focusing their efforts on appeasing offenders instead of helping victims to get through the horrific experiences they have faced. The former victims commissioner, Louise Casey, did a good job of highlighting this issue alongside charities such as Victim Support, the National Victims Association and Support After Murder and Manslaughter Abroad. The Government’s response to the consultation on its “Getting it right for victims and witnesses” strategy is due later this year, and I very much hope that they will recognise where the proposals need beefing up and that they will show some flexibility and deliver the new and improved services that victims of crime need. At the moment, my constituent Marie Heath and her family are being subjected to the horrendous ordeal of travelling to Germany every week for the ongoing trial of the defendants alleged to have brutally murdered her son. The family face huge logistical challenges and thousands of pounds in costs. The Government are aware of that case and I hope that in the Bill they will learn from the experience of the Heaths and many other victims of crime.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about people’s need to feel secure, to feel that sentencing is appropriate and to feel that those who should be behind bars are behind bars. Does she, like me, want the Government to take steps to ensure that sentences mean that if someone is sentenced to four years, for example, they serve those four years as opposed to perhaps just two?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are talking about public confidence in the criminal justice system, which should do what it says on the tin. If an offender is sentenced to four years, the public do not want them released within 18 months or a shorter time. They want to know that the full sentence will be served. This is a good opportunity for the Government to restore public confidence in our criminal justice system.

I welcome the proposals the Government have outlined to free up businesses and scrap costly and unnecessary burdens on them. I refer to regulation. As the daughter of a small shopkeeper, I have recognised throughout my adult and teenage working life how important small businesses are for jobs and economic growth. I have also become very aware of regulation. As shopkeepers, my parents have owned a range of small shops—post offices, supermarkets and newsagents. We have been through many iterations of health and safety legislation, business and small shop regulation, Sunday trading, opening hours and particularly employment legislation. You name it, Madam Deputy Speaker, and we have been there, seen it and done it.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are the bedrock of our economy. We were once described as a nation of shopkeepers, but we do not feel like that any more, as small and independent retailers are decimated in our high streets. More needs to be done. SMEs support two thirds of jobs throughout the country. In my constituency, the figure rises to 83%, which is high and I should like it to be higher. With greater economic liberalisation and less regulation I am sure that will happen.

The ability of business owners and entrepreneurs to create even more jobs has been compromised by the unrelenting growth of regulation from both Whitehall and Brussels. In 2011, 84% of businesses reported that they spent more time dealing with legislation than in 2009. The annual cost to SMEs of that compliance is about £17 billion, which is equivalent to the cost of Crossrail, and 12 times the Government’s budget for apprenticeships.

The Government are committed to the red tape challenge; they have already identified more than 600 regulations to be scrapped or overhauled. The sooner the process begins, the better. Freeing business from the costs imposed by regulation will allow them, importantly, to invest in more jobs and economic growth.

I urge the Government to take more robust action on EU red tape. For me as a new Member of Parliament, one of the most disappointing aspects of EU regulation was the enforcement in the previous Session of the agency workers regulations, which unfortunately the Government could do nothing about because the previous Government had done the deal. That has cost business £1.5 billion. Such regulations do far more to create unemployment and block job creation than they do to support workers’ rights.

In my constituency and throughout Essex, more people are prepared to take risks and set up their own business. As many Members may have seen in the news over the past 24 hours, there has been a great deal of political focus on Essex; one might argue that the only way is up in Essex. It is indeed a county of dynamic entrepreneurs. Many of my constituents are prepared to go out on a limb and do the right thing, which is to take risks and set up a business. In the county of entrepreneurs, there are 6,000 new enterprise births a year. The figure is high, and I hope that it will grow higher.

As the Prime Minister saw on his visit yesterday, those wealth creators will be key to the future economic success not just of the county of Essex but of our country. By taking steps to empower them to create more wealth, jobs and prosperity, we can once again restore dynamism and strength in the British economy, and as a country we shall start to regain our rightful place in the world economic league tables. That is why I support the Queen’s Speech and everything the Government are doing on economic and regulatory reform.

Deregulation

Debate between Priti Patel and Thérèse Coffey

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend makes a fair point, and on the subject of energy, the energy red tape challenge will close in less than an hour, according to the Twitter feed on the red tape challenge.

I understand my hon. Friend’s point completely. There is an interesting balance to be struck in legislating for safety by introducing regulations. I agree with her that we do not want unnecessary regulations introduced to try to keep cartels or oligopolies going. Whether it is in response to the REACH—registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals—directive or the herbal products directive, which we are busy trying to implement at the moment in response to European laws that have been passed, there is an argument for allowing people to make their own decisions and choices, rather than having regulation decide things for them.

I also wanted to refer to my hon. Friend’s work on child care. She has done quite a lot of policy work about the cost of child care, and how costs that have been driven into the industry mean that child care becomes exceptionally expensive for parents who want to go to work, but who sometimes cannot afford to, or for whom work seems only to pay for the costs of child care. The question is rightly being asked: what is driving that cost? Looking after children of course takes skill, but it need not take a graduate degree. Over the years, we have ended up with various regulations, leading to a situation in 2009 when two police officers were told that they could not look after each other’s children for more than so many hours at a time because, as they were not registered as child minders, the activity was deemed illegal. The Government looked into the matter, but this is another example of common sense being replaced by some bright spark’s desire to ensure that children are looked after only by child minders, rather than by their parents’ friends or colleagues.

Another issue that comes up regularly is the portability of the Criminal Records Bureau check. Someone going into a school might need five different CRB checks, depending on the activity they want to do. I know that the Government are looking into such issues but, as I said at the start of my speech, I encourage them to go much further, much faster. Not only will that help their constituents, but it will free up Government time to focus on what really matters—assisting people at home and helping businesses to grow and to employ people.

The Prime Minister is reported to have said in the past few days that he is looking for Ministers to ensure that their Bills pass the U-turn test—in other words, to ensure that there are no U-turns. Some of this is about drafting simpler legislation, but a lot of it is about not trying to regulate for every possible scenario. One of the challenges that our country has been facing—this is no criticism of the people involved—is that an openness to having everything in regulation means that measures can become a lawyers’ picnic, with everything open to judicial review. The constant desire to put everything in statute is a huge challenge, because people almost cannot turn for the risk of being taken to court or to judicial review. That is not to say, of course, that people should not have recourse to action when something is patently unfair, but we all, as Members of Parliament, need to consider whether we will end up with lawyers and judges deciding what is right and wrong, rather than Parliament deciding on that through better laws.

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Businesses, certainly in my constituency but also across the country, definitely welcome the Government’s agenda of deregulating much more, but does she agree that small and medium-sized businesses are still deeply sceptical and concerned about the constant battles they face, including legal judgments and even with local authorities, which seem to think they know best, when it is the businesses themselves that know how to get on and make the right decisions to thrive and grow?

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, especially about the role of local authorities. With her pedigree in a family business and through her subsequent work, she knows about the challenges that people in our constituencies face every day. I will mention one case.

To my surprise, my local district council has responded in an over-the-top way to a deemed health and safety risk. In one part of the country, problems were identified with a commercial building’s liquefied petroleum gas tank, and that led to a measure, across the country, to investigate every such LPG tank. That led to a series of visits, and to changes having to be made. Tanks have not exploded and no risk has been identified, but the tanks must now have cages and there must be a clearing away from the site. There was also a two-page detailed submission by the council officer, essentially telling people that they had to provide details, written instructions, training, and a sign to explain how to call the emergency services, instead of allowing our local pub to use common sense: “If there’s a fire, I’ll tell you what: you just call 999.” I was told: “Well, that business might not have mainly English-speaking people working in it.” For God’s sake, let us use our common sense, so that council officers are talking to their businesses and not issuing two-page template instructions about how to dial 999.

I appreciate that setting out laws represents an ambition—a way of ensuring that we do things in a certain manner—but I encourage the Government to try to not only take the scissors to red tape, as they are already doing, but to get out the shears and really start hacking back. This is about supporting common sense and having simpler legislation. I have every confidence in the Minister, but please, let us go for as short a haircut as we can.