Environment Bill (Thirteenth sitting)

Richard Graham Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 13th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th November 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Rebecca Pow]

First, I thank the hon. Member for Newport West for withdrawing her previous amendment and not pushing it to a vote. I thank her for her consideration of this particular amendment, but I would like to reassure her and the Committee that I do not believe it is necessary.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right: it is important that as a society we monitor and address social issues relating to the manufacture of products and materials. In the UK, we address them through legislation, such as the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Human Rights Act 1998. Other initiatives, such as the United Nations’ International Labour Organisation and the Forest Stewardship Council, look to tackle those issues on a global scale.

However, the core focus of extended producer responsibility is to encourage producers to take actions that will help to protect and improve the environment, including paying the costs of managing products at the end of their life and improving the design of products to make them recyclable or increase the amount of recycled material that they contain—all the things that we have mentioned previously. Recycling rates will then increase and the supply of secondary material will increase.

I will quickly address the issue that the hon. Lady touched on about Sri Lanka. I just want to highlight that it is a manifesto commitment, which we will implement through this Bill, to ban all exports of plastic waste to non-OECD countries. That is in clause 59, I think—I cannot read my writing. I have terrible writing.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister, because this is very important and the hon. Member for Newport West was right to raise it. Those of us who have responsibilities as trade envoys are very conscious of some of the damage done to relationships with overseas countries, particularly Commonwealth countries, where waste has effectively been dumped by local councils. That is partly due to the supply chain for waste disposal. Does the Minister agree that this Bill will make real steps forward in tackling that problem?

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that issue. The hon. Member for Putney touched on litter, and I was going to say that this is a very wide subject—waste, hazardous waste, export of waste, litter—and clauses 60 to 68 deal with a whole lot of those issues, so we will discuss them at length when we get to them. However, we are mindful of what my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester says, and there are measures in the Bill to really get to grips with some of those things, which are rightly important, especially for our global standing, as he says with his trade envoy hat on. I know he does such great work representing us, so I thank him for that.

I must disagree with the hon. Member for Southampton, Test about words being mangled. The only thing that we want mangled is the waste, so that we can take it apart and turn it into something else. I completely disagree that the words have been mangled by those who have so carefully drafted the legislation. I will highlight the fact that the extended producer responsibility scheme and the requirements to cover the full net disposal costs of their products and materials when they become waste will encourage producers to make these changes that we all want to the design and the materials that will have an impact on the whole supply chain. That is the purpose of all this. That will then increase the supply of materials for recycling and the quality of material for recycling, by reducing contamination and the use of hard-to-recycle products and materials. The whole circular system will be dealt with, so I take issue with his mangling suggestion.

At the end of the day, our supply chains will be strengthened in secondary materials, which is so important that we will then give investors the signal and the confidence they need to invest in our UK recycling industry, so we can put the recycling units that my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden mentioned everywhere they are required and companies such as Coca-Cola can have all the PET plastic they want to make all the bottles they would like to make from good-quality recycled plastic. It is difficult to get hold of enough of many those things now, but when we get these measures in place, the idea is that it will all be sorted out. I can see the hon. Member for Cambridge smiling at me, but I know he knows that I am on the right track.

[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend the Minister made a good point about making sure that the costs to the private sector involved in helping us recycle more come to a level at which it is important for them to invest. The fringe benefits from that are massive. Many of the recycling centres that previously sent waste to landfill are now available for all sorts of green energy projects including solar, hydrogen and onshore wind. It will make a huge difference in my constituency of Gloucester, so I am grateful for what she says about how the Bill will help that.

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning his constituency and for raising that important point about how we need to get business on board, and how we need to give the right signals and get the right things to happen to move us to the circular economy. At the end of the day, we want less waste landfilled or incinerated, less litter and a decrease in the use of virgin raw materials. These outcomes bring wider social benefits —touching on amendment 17—as they improve the environment for the public and for wildlife. They also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For all of these reasons, the measures in the Environment Bill are strong enough as they stand, and it follows that social issues such as poor conditions for workers are considered outside the scope of extended producer responsibility. I ask the hon. Lady to withdraw the amendment.