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 financial impact of being required to apply Extended Producer Responsibility charges retrospectively in the absence of published official rates for relevant material streams on businesses.

The Regulations do not impose a retrospective charge and were subject to the required legal and parliamentary scrutiny before coming into force

To prepare businesses for the implementation of the packaging pEPR scheme we have now published illustrative base fees, based on local authority waste management costs forming the basis for indicative local authority payments for 2025, and on packaging tonnages reported by large producers for the first 6-months of 2024. These illustrative base fees for the first time show point estimates as opposed to ranges, providing further certainty to businesses. Producers were required to submit their final 2024 data by 1 April 2025. Following this deadline, regulators are conducting regulatory checks. Once checks are conducted to an appropriate level we will use 2024 data and insight from regulator checks to publish packaging Extended Producer Responsibility (pEPR) base fees in June 2025.