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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of his Department's waste policies for supporting (a) reuse, (b) prevention and c) recycling of waste materials.

Alongside our 2018 Resources and Waste Strategy, the Government’s ambitions to minimise waste were outlined earlier this year in Maximising Resources, Minimising Waste , our new Waste Prevention Programme for England. This sets out our priorities for action to manage resources and waste in accordance with the waste hierarchy across key sectors. It also embeds our circular economy approach by retaining materials and goods in circulation for as long as possible and at their highest value, including through increasing reuse, repair and remanufacture. The final chapter of the Programme sets out our plans to monitor and evaluate progress. We have indicators in place to capture changes and we will monitor trends over an extended period of time. In addition, through the National Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Research programme, experts will support Defra in exploring the metrics and data requirements needed to support a circular economy.

We are also introducing our Simpler Recycling reforms which will ensure that across England, people will be able to recycle the same materials, no longer needing to check what their council will accept for recycling. This policy will make recycling easier and ensure there is a comprehensive, consistent service across England. This will reduce confusion with recycling to improve recycling rates, ensuring there is more recycled material in the products we buy, and the UK recycling industry grows.