Waste Incinerators

Steve Barclay Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Steve Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I welcome the debate called by the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker); it highlights the cross-party consensus in opposing further incinerators.

In terms of the Wisbech incinerator, it is remarkable that an application to build an incinerator half the size was rejected in the local authority next door, so the response of developers was to double the size in order to make it a nationally significant infrastructure project, to get out of the local planning rules; to put it next to the biggest school in the district—only 700 metres away; to take waste from six different counties, all on small roads in a rural market town; and to have a chimney bigger than Ely cathedral in the flat landscape of the Fens. One can understand why so many people share my concern with the proposal.

I do not want to repeat the very good points that colleagues have made. I want to highlight two new points that the debate has not highlighted so far, which I hope will help Opposition and Government Members and support my own case in empowering the Minister. First, I will cite the Government’s own figures. On 30 December —quite recently—the Government’s own analysis showed that as of 2024 there was already 20.6 megatonnes of residual waste infrastructure capacity in England, of which 14.3 megatonnes was incineration. To put that in plain language, we already have enough incinerator capacity today to deal with the amount of waste that was projected in 2023 to arise by 2035—19.4 megatonnes of residual municipal waste. In other words, our existing capacity, at over 20 megatonnes, is more than we will need in just nine years’ time.

My first question to the Minister is whether DEFRA will commit to publishing analysis assessing the environmental damage of building incinerators, such as the huge incinerator at Wisbech, against the fact that they will be surplus to requirements in as little as nine years’ time. In other words, it will three years to build the incinerator, and after six years of operation it will be additional capacity to what we will need. We therefore need to assess how those two things compare.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Member agree that a sense of where incinerators are located around the country would be helpful, so that we could see the demand for incineration versus the capacity? That might reveal oversupply in certain parts of the country.

[Steve Barclay]

That is a fair point, which is addressed in DEFRA’s December paper. But as my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) highlighted, there are two at Huntingdon, another at Peterborough and two at Boston. There is already a concentration, so I do not accept the point about the east of England in that paper. My point is that we need to see analysis from DEFRA around the bridging issue for the next few years as the Government meet their legal target to reduce the amount of waste by 50% between 2019 and 2042. The amount of residual waste is coming down and we already have sufficient capacity, but there is a bridging issue. There will be short-term options around landfill refuse-derived fuel exports. We need to look at the respective merits of building huge incinerators and the damage that they will do compared with the short-term bridging options.

The second point is that the waste mix has changed. That was a feature of the BBC report that the hon. Member for Derby South highlighted. Burning food waste produces less CO₂ than putting it in landfill, but burning plastics produces 175 times more carbon dioxide than burying it. The reason that that matters—to my first point about bridging—is that the mix going into incineration has fundamentally changed from when the planning rules were initially put in place. What we have seen, and what the BBC highlighted, is an increase in food waste being dealt with through anaerobic digestion. As the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) pointed out, the predominant waste now going to incineration is plastics. It is the burning of plastics that drives the environmental damage, and that is why the hon. Member for Derby South correctly pointed out that it is the dirtiest way that the UK generates power.

My second question is whether the Minister will commit to publishing a composition analysis study of the residual waste treated at energy recovery facilities, as I asked for in a written question on 16 October. DEFRA has confirmed that it is undertaking a composition analysis study, but it was not published with the December analysis. Will the Minister commit to publishing that, so that we can see where the waste is going? Again, that fundamentally changes the environmental case around incineration.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh]

I have set out the actions that we are taking to drive up recycling rates, one of which is to put paid to the proposal we inherited for up to seven bins through the simpler recycling reforms. We have been really clear that we will have black bin waste and mandatory food collections in every local authority, because that does not happen. It obviously happens in Islington, but it does not happen with uniformity across the country. Mandatory food waste recycling came in for businesses on 1 April this year, and it will come in for local authorities on 1 April 2026. That standardisation of recycling and collections should help us all to do better and play our part.

I take on board the right hon. Gentleman’s point about collecting from flats. There are really serious problems. One issue is that recyclable waste is often put into black bins, so they get full very quickly, when actually a lot of stuff could be taken out. The deposit return scheme, the simpler recycling reforms and the extended producer responsibility scheme are really big changes developed under the previous Government and carried on by us at speed, because we have no time to waste. We have to move away from our linear, unsustainable “take, make, throw” model, where we just extract things, make things and throw them away. We want to end the throwaway society, and for things that are made in Britain to be built to last, as they were in olden times.

[Steve Barclay]

Just to follow the logic of the Minister’s point, if more recycling is being promoted by the Government, which is what she has set out, self-evidently both the composition of waste and the existing capacity for incineration will be sufficient. In their December paper, the Government said:

“While there are a number of waste incineration facilities that are consented, but not yet under construction, it is highly unlikely that these will be brought forward.”

If that is the Government’s expectation, and if the Minister is increasing recycling and the capacity is sufficient, why not give clarity to the public and her own Back Benchers by saying, “No more incinerators”?

[Mary Creagh]

The right hon. Gentleman asked about a couple of things in his speech, so I will respond to those first. He asked about composition analysis—we are getting into deep technical detail—and it is about what is actually being incinerated. What is being burned? The right hon. Member for Islington North asked why we do not just put plastic in the ground, as it would just sit there, inert. What is going into incineration?

My understanding is that the emissions trading scheme was consulted on under the previous Government—that bringing local authority energy-from-waste facilities into the ETS from 2028 was consulted on in 2024, so it was an in-flight proposal—but I am very happy to be corrected if I am wrong. The residual municipal waste composition study, covering the period from May 2024 to May 2025, will be published later this year, and I know we cannot wait. It will be interesting, because it is essentially the baseline. It is where we will see if the changes are going to start feeding through.

We said in our manifesto that we would reduce waste by transitioning to a circular economy, which is one of the Secretary of State’s five priorities for DEFRA. I am really proud to be the Minister responsible for that.

The right hon. Member for Islington North asked why we cannot just landfill waste plastics, but there are wider environmental impacts from landfilling plastics than simply carbon emissions, including the issue of microplastics. We do not yet fully understand how plastics degrade in landfill in the long term. Emerging research is exploring the potential of plastic-degrading bacteria in landfills, which could break down plastics and in turn impact greenhouse gas emissions. However, I gently say that we cannot solve today’s problems by storing them up for future generations.

The UK emissions trading scheme is minded to expand the scope of the emissions trading scheme to include energy-from-waste facilities. A consultation on this was published in 2024, which included a call for evidence on incentivising heat networks. With the energy-from-waste plants, there is electricity generation, but there is also a massive excess of heat. Most of that heat just dissipates, but it would be much more efficient to use it, as Coventry city council has with its mile-long pipe under London Road, which heats the local swimming pool or Coventry University’s buildings. I understand that the authority will respond in due course.

At the end of last year, we set out that we will require proposals for new facilities to demonstrate that they will facilitate the diversion of residual waste away from landfill or enable the replacement of older and less efficient facilities. This position reflects the evidence and analysis we have published. It also reflects the waste hierarchy and is congruent with the transition to a circular economy.

Even after the successful delivery of our recycling reforms, there will be sufficient residual waste capacity to treat forecast municipal residual waste arising at national level. On that point, my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South is correct. However, there are five areas in England where more than half the residual waste collected by local authorities was sent to landfill in 2023-24. Landfill was also still relied on for an estimated 5.4 million tonnes of non-municipal, non-major mineral waste in 2022, which is the most recent year for which data is available.

We know about the waste that goes into our bins, but there is a lot of other stuff coming out of construction sites, and so on. My hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (James Naish) and I had a chat about this issue in the Lobby, but the analysis the Government published at the end of last year sets out the regional disparities and the regional capacities. It is a good read.