Separation of Waste (England) Regulations 2024

Baroness Coffey Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on introducing the regulations before us, which I broadly support. I will direct my questions to two specific areas.

The Minister mentioned that guidance will be given to councils on the separate collections. My concern is around what guidance will be given by councils to households in particular. I remember chairing the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee at the time of the “horsegate” scandal, where people found that they were eating prepared foods—usually lasagne—made from horsemeat, not beef. It ended, I think, a lot of people’s desire to carry on eating these pre-prepared, highly expensive, undernutritious, highly salted foods. However, if you are a householder and you have one of these trays in front of you, it normally goes, I assume, in your food waste because it is highly contaminated—or the packet that the lasagne I have eaten was in will have to be rinsed sufficiently to ensure that it is not contaminated.

Who is going to guide households on what to do with such prepared food, where it is difficult to get rid of the residual food waste? How does the Minister intend to ensure that, if it goes into the paper recycling, which will now be a separate collection, this will not lead to greater contamination? How will guidance be given to households to ensure that there is no cross-contamination? How does the Minister plan to ensure that there will be no increase in cross-contamination because of the contaminated stuff going into the wrong recycling bin or plastic bag—whatever it is called—that we are going to be issued with?

I would also like to press the Minister on ensuring that a strong message will go out from the Government to councils that there will continue to be a mandatory weekly food waste collection. Anything less frequent than that will lead to vermin and a lot of highly undesirable threats to households, through no fault of their own.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I made my maiden speech last week simply to make sure that I could speak in today’s debate. I congratulate the Minister on bringing these regulations forward; it is fair to say, I think, that they have been a long time in gestation. I recall, back in 2018, the resources and waste strategy setting out the idea of trying to get consistent recycling. I have to say, when I became the Secretary of State a while ago, I worked quite hard on this issue to try to get simpler recycling to achieve the outcomes that the Minister has set out.