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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will make it his policy to impose a moratorium on new build incinerators and withhold any increase in capacity requests to licences already in place until additional research on incinerator overcapacity has been concluded.

Defra has no plans to introduce a moratorium on new energy from waste (EfW) capacity in England. In the Resources and Waste Strategy we committed to monitoring residual waste treatment capacity and we intend to publish a fresh analysis over coming months. Local authorities are responsible for determining their waste treatment capacity needs at a local level via Waste Local Plans and need to factor national policy measures being implemented into their forward planning. A proposed plant must not result in overcapacity of EfW waste treatment at a national or local level.