Environment Bill

Sally-Ann Hart Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I thank the hon. Lady for her speech, but I am afraid we must move on now to Sally-Ann Hart.

[Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) (Con) [V]]

This Environment Bill is major legislation and a mark of this Government’s commitment to our environment and combating climate change. As the Prime Minister said, it is

“a lodestar by which we will guide our country towards a cleaner, and greener future.”

This Bill is the flagship of a wider package of Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs legislation, including the Agriculture Act 2020 and the Fisheries Act 2020, which seeks to deliver on the Government’s pledge to leave the environment in a better state than they inherited it in.

New clause 11, on environmental targets on plastic pollution, has been tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder), and I wish to focus my comments on it today. Plastic pollutes land and oceans, and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of its life cycle, from its production to its refining and the way it is managed as a waste product. The scourge of plastic waste—the litter we see in our oceans, and on our beaches, streets, pavements and roadsides—takes hundreds of years to decompose, contaminating our soil and water. The toxic chemicals used to manufacture plastic get transferred to animal tissue and eventually enter the human food chain, risking our health.

In my constituency of beautiful Hastings and Rye, we have a number of stunning beaches, at Camber, Winchelsea, Pett and Hastings. Single-use plastic such as straws, cups, bottles and bags, blights all parts of our environment. Litter picking groups such as Hastings Beach Clean, Tidy Up St Leonards and Rye Harbour Beach Clean pick up bag-loads of plastic every time they go out. However, there is no doubt that this Government have taken the plastic challenge seriously. In 2018, they published a resources and waste strategy, and they have taken measures such as banning plastic straws and microbeads. They are leading global efforts to tackle ocean pollution, including by launching the Commonwealth Clean Ocean Alliance alongside Vanuatu. The requirement for large retailers to charge 5p for single-use plastic carriers bags has seen plastic bag sales drop 90% since its introduction.

The Bill includes a range of measures to tackle plastic use and disposal, such as new charges on single-use plastic and a new deposit return scheme, which should incentivise consumers to choose more sustainable products over plastic ones. The amendment seeks to work with the grain of the measures already set out in the Bill to end the systemic over-production and consumption of polluting plastics and non-essential single-use items. However, it would also require the Government to set targets to reduce plastic pollution and the volume of non-essential single-use plastic products sold by a designated date. For those reasons, I support the amendment.