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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of supporting the introduction of bottle deposit schemes in (a) Yeovil constituency and (b) other rural communities.

The Government has engaged with stakeholders as we developed policy for the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) for drink containers, including two public consultations: the first in 2019 and the second in 2021. 83% of the 2,590 responses to the 2021 consultation supported a DRS. We also published the Final Impact Assessment on DRS for England and Northern Ireland in November 2024.

The Deposit Management Organisation, who will run the scheme, is legally required to ensure there is a comprehensive returns network, so that rural communities, like Yeovil, can easily redeem their deposits and people have convenient access to a return point wherever they live.