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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how his Department determined the fee rates for Extended Producer Responsibility; and whether he consulted industry on those rates.

Illustrative base fees are calculated by dividing packaging waste management costs (for household packaging waste) and other relevant costs by the total amount of household packaging placed on the market and this principle was consulted on in 2019 and again in 2021. Since August 2024 Defra have worked closely with packaging producers to refine the approach to modelling fees and ensure they more accurately reflect the price drivers for local authority collection costs. On 20 December Defra published the third iteration of illustrative fees, based on the agreed final proposed modelling scenario for the total disposal costs that should be recovered through EPR in 2025. The illustrative base fees use packaging tonnage data submitted to date by producers on the Report Packaging Data (RPD) online portal for the first six months of 2024, with adjustments applied (see below for further details). These fees represent the best possible point estimate of base fees given currently available information. Final fees, used to invoice producers from October 2025, are expected to be calculated in June 2025 using tonnage data reported by producers for the full year of 2024.