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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he has made an assessment of the potential (a) impact of inflation on thresholds for qualification as a large business under Extended Producer Responsibility and (b) merits of staggered thresholds.

The thresholds for qualification under Packaging Extended Producer Responsibility remain in line with those set out in the Packaging Waste Regulations 2007 which sets the threshold for businesses handling at least 50 tonnes of packaging materials and with a turnover of £2 million a year. This decision was made following extensive consultation, which also considered reduction or removal of the threshold, to encourage all producers to use less packaging and ensure the packaging they do use is easy to recycle.

To support this aim, the Government is also introducing a new distributor approach which places a new obligation on large packaging manufacturers and importers that sell unfilled packaging to small, unobligated producers, ensuring all packaging is subject to extended producer responsibility.

Once the scheme is fully operational, we will review these thresholds to ensure they continue to meet the aims of the scheme. This will include the impact of inflation, and the effectiveness of the new distributor obligations, to ensure that we are obligating as much packaging as possible whilst still protecting the smallest businesses from the burden of complying with the regulations.