Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to reduce the amount of existing plastic waste in the environment.

One way plastic enters the environment is through littering. Local authorities have a statutory duty to keep their public land clear of litter and refuse.

We have been proud to support and endorse national clean-up initiatives such as the Great British Spring Clean, and the Great British Beach Clean, and we will continue to use our influence to encourage as many people and businesses as possible to participate in these types of events again.

Community Payback also plays a key role in clearing up communities, working in partnership with Local Authorities and the voluntary sector. The Government has pledged to inject up to a further £93 million of additional investment into Community Payback, to ensure criminals sentenced to probation-supervised community sentences across England and Wales complete up to eight million hours of unpaid Community Payback per year. This will involve picking litter, clearing wastelands, and extending offenders’ involvement in Keep Britain Tidy’s projects.

The UK Government is also proud to have supported the proposal by Rwanda and Peru that led to the ambitious resolution to start negotiating an international legally binding treaty to end plastic pollution, being agreed at the United Nations Environment Assembly in March 2022. The process to negotiate a new agreement is now underway, and the UK has taken an ambitious stance, including calling for provisions in the instrument to remediate and remove existing plastic pollution from the environment.