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10 May 2006 : Column 145WH
It is interesting that my hon. Friend used a slightly different figure from the one that I have heard cited previously for the cost per tonne achieved by Wastesavers in Newport. Getting the cost down so low is an incredible achievement. She will, I am sure, appreciate that part of the explanation is that the organisation is community-based and that some of those involved are volunteers. They work efficiently and well, but she is right to point out that there are wide variations in the costs not only of recycling and kerbside collection but of waste management by local authorities as a whole.
My hon. Friend will be pleased to know that the Government are considering that issue, not just as part of the review of our waste strategy but as a result of the Gershon report in 2004, which identified potential for considerable savings in our waste management and collection systems. We should be interested in studying the experience of Wastesavers, which one of my officials has already visited. I should be delighted to take my hon. Friend up on her invitation; she can show me around. I am keen, in the months ahead, following the closing of the consultation yesterday, and before the publication of our renewed waste strategy, to examine best practice and ensure that we get the strategy right.
We need to do that—my hon. Friend has, again, made the point well—because although we have made dramatic improvements in this country in recent years we have an awful long way to go. We still use landfill far too much. Landfill, as everyone recognises, is the least environmentally friendly way of managing our waste. We need to get our recycling and recovery levels up to those of continental Europe and our landfill levels down.
Kerry McCarthy: Is the Minister aware that one of the problems of current landfill policy—according to Bristol city council, which, again, does not have a good record on recyling—is that it is more economically viable to recycle heavier objects? When I have tried to encourage the council to recycle plastics, it has replied that that is not cost-effective, because plastic does not weigh as much.
Mr. Bradshaw: My hon. Friend is right. It is depressing, when some local authorities are as good as Newport and are doing so well on recycling, that others, such as Bristol and Swindon, do so badly. There is no excuse for it, and my hon. Friends may want to take a stark warning back to their constituents and local authorities. Their constituents will pay the price for poor performance on recycling.
As the landfill tax escalator hits in as one of the major financial incentives, council tax payers in Bristol and Swindon will pay the price for the poor performance of their local authorities. In recent years, the ratcheting up of the system has been made even more effective by the introduction of the landfill allowance trading scheme, which is rather like the emissions trading scheme, one of the mechanisms used to deal with climate change. Local authorities that perform badly can buy extra landfill allowance from other local authorities, but, again, that will involve a
cost to council tax payers. It is not merely good for the environment to recycle, reuse and compost; it is, in the long run, also cheaper for council tax payers.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, East (Kerry McCarthy) is right about the importance of community recycling network schemes. I know of the headquarters in her constituency, and in fact I met the chief executive, or whatever he calls himself, fairly recently. He has had some very constructive meetings with my officials to make sure that those schemes are not forgotten in our consideration of our new waste strategy.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point to the perverse incentives in our waste policy under the weight-based system. That system sometimes incentivises local authorities to collect heavy waste for recycling, because that boosts their recycling rates, and waste that is easy to collect. I shall give her a good example: hon. Members may have noticed that recently many local authorities have rapidly expanded their so-called green waste collections of garden waste. That has been a very easy way for local authorities to increase their recycling rates, but of course it is much easier for local authorities in leafy suburbs and rural areas to do that than it is for local authorities in some inner-city areas. There is a real problem with the incentives in the current weight-based system, and we are actively considering that as part of the waste review.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newport, East may also be interested to know that my officials are working with Wastesavers in her constituency to look into how it achieves what it does, and to get it to be an exemplar for other social and community-based recycling and waste management organisations across the country. That is because we want a lot more successful, social and community-based, voluntary-based organisations involved in how we manage our waste, for the very reason touched on by a number of hon. Members: we are not just talking about a sensible, efficient and environmentally friendly way of managing waste; the issue is also about getting community action and community spiritedness on the whole issue of managing waste.
If people based in, and coming from, the community are running such organisations and providing the sort of opportunities to which my hon. Friend referred—opportunities for disadvantaged people, people coming out of prison who want to rehabilitate themselves, people with learning disabilities and so forth—that is a fantastic contribution that they can make. Also, people benefit enormously from the sort of work that that involves, and as my hon. Friend rightly says, it is often a stepping-stone by which they can re-enter the full-time employment market, so it is a virtuous circle.
We would like enterprises such as Wastesavers in Newport to expand. There are examples of other bodies that have expanded and gone to other places, but my understanding is that Wastesavers is quite happy staying the size it is, and as a result it has agreed to share its business plan with anyone who is interested. My hon. Friend has already established herself in the House as a great ambassador for sustainable waste management and for Wastesavers in her constituency. May she go far afield, singing its praises and suggesting that people in other parts of the country talk to
Wastesavers—a process that we will certainly encourage—to see whether they can replicate elsewhere its wonderful practices in Newport.
The hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mark Williams) is absolutely right to say that in the past there have been issues to do with prohibitive licence costs for composting and recycling organisations. Community composting organisations raised that with me very soon after I took on the waste brief, just under a year ago. They were worried that they would be put out of business by some of the new charges coming in. We shelved those charges, and over the past 12 months we have undertaken a review of them. I am confident that in the next few weeks we will come forward with a revised system that will benefit the sorts of recycling and composting organisations to which the hon. Gentleman referred, and that should be cheaper for the Environment Agency. I am absolutely determined not to put barriers in the way of those sorts of very sensible and effective community organisations.
I should have said at the beginning of my speech that everything that I have said about visiting and so on is
with the slight caveat that I remain the Minister responsible for such matters. Hon. Members will understand that DEFRA has become an almost completely new Department and the portfolios may be switched around.
I hope that I retain that responsibility because I very much enjoyed seeing the waste review through. There is huge and growing interest in the matter, as the debate has illustrated, and it will be a huge environmental challenge for the country. If we fail to get it right in the next few years, not only will the environmental consequences be extremely serious, because we will continue to produce methane through landfill—hon. Members know that it is one of the most damaging greenhouse gases—but the country and individual local authorities will become liable to swingeing fines from the European Commission for failing to meet our landfill targets.
Adjourned accordingly at four minutes to Five o’clock.
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