Steve
Webb: As I understand it, the hon. Gentleman’s
amendment No. 108 would prevent authorities that do not have weekly
residual waste schemes from running pilots. Although the boundary of
pilots is that they must be revenue-neutral, they could be net
give-aways. A council could run a scheme that did not penalise anybody
but just rewarded people, but his amendment prohibits authorities that
do not have weekly collections from running such pilots, which I
thought he would approve
of.
Gregory
Barker: I should point out that the amendments are not
mine but those of my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The
Border. However, I wanted to put them before the Committee so that they
could be properly discussed. The hon. Gentleman raises a sensible
point, but the amendments’ main purpose is clear—to allow
the Committee a full discussion of the issues. I shall speak clearly to
my own
amendment. We
do not think that it is in the interest of the recycling agenda to talk
about criminalising people who simply fail to change their waste habits
sufficiently. I cannot imagine a better way to get people’s
backs up against something that they are naturally predisposed to do
than to tell them that if they do not do it, the Government will regard
them as criminals. There is a lot of merit in amendment No.
107. The
vital issue of public support and engagement leads me to new clause 18.
I have spoken to the Committee about the public suspicion that stealth
taxes are being dressed up as green taxes, and the danger that that
poses of putting an otherwise enthusiastic public off greening our
country. We must tread carefully around the issue of pay-as-you-throw
bin taxes. My party agrees totally with the Government that if we are
to reduce the amount of domestic waste that we produce, it must first
be measured—we cannot reduce something unless we know how much
of it we are dealing with—but how to incentivise the reduction
of waste to landfill is where we part company.
By all means,
we should offer people incentives: “Yes, you will pay less on
your council tax if you send less waste to landfill.” That is
our common aspiration and the ambition of new clause 18. However, my
party does not wish to shake a stick at the public and say in the same
breath, “But if you don’t comply with this regulation,
we’ll fine you through an additional charge on your council
tax.” There are a number of reasons for our opposition to such a
penalty
system. Ms
Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab):
Will the hon. Gentleman explain how the incentive is to be funded
without a corresponding mechanism for raising
income?
Gregory
Barker: From the council tax. If somebody produces less
waste and instead produces recyclates, which have an economic value,
that should generate income. Currently, we have a standard tariff for
council tax. Encouraging more people to recycle will result in
over-achievement of targets. It should be revenue-positive.
It is a
different sort of cash planning that assumes all the differentials and
incorporates into forward revenue planning and penalties for
non-recyclables. We think that that is the wrong way to go. If more
people recycle and reduce their waste, that will in itself create
surplus value, which should be retained. We should not create surplus
value by penalising and fining people at this stage. If we are to get
people into the recycling habit, we should be talking about carrots,
not
sticks. As
I have said, the Government’s approach is a good way to turn
people off doing the right thing. The cost of living has already risen
dramatically in the past year, so we must be careful that the measures
are not seen as another way for this Government to extract money from
the public, as they have done in so many other
matters. Mr.
David Chaytor (Bury, North) (Lab): I agree completely with
the hon. Gentleman about the need for public reassurance that the new
and innovative schemes are genuinely about waste reduction. He made the
point about more carrots and no sticks, and said simultaneously that
the scheme would be funded entirely from a council’s own budget,
but surely the incentives to those who increase their recycling will be
paid for by a significant increase in everyone else’s council
tax. The stick will be a disproportionately higher increase in council
tax.
Gregory
Barker: I do not agree. If we were saying that there was
no economic value to recycling and no benefit to be gained from
reducing the amount of rubbish that is collected, the hon. Gentleman
would have a point. However, as is recognised with benefit incentive
systems that operate in north America and in some parts of
Europe—certainly in the United States—there is an
economic value to people recycling. Someone will reap the benefit. By
and large, recyclates have an economic value, and if the council has to
collect, through its contractor, less rubbish as a result of people
recycling more, an economic surplus should be generated in the system.
We are saying that that surplus should be distributed back to those who
helped to generate it. It is not the zero-sum game that the hon.
Gentleman and the Minister have
implied.
Mr.
Chaytor: I appreciate the logic of what the hon. Gentleman
is saying. In time, with a mature and fully developed recycling
industry, that might happen, but at this stage in Britain’s
recycling process, the flaw in his argument is that he is assuming that
the value of the recyclate that is created is equivalent to the level
of incentive needed to encourage more people to recycle. Given the
legacy of the low levels of recycling that the Government inherited,
that is just not the case. He is describing an ideal model, but one
that is completely unrelated to
reality.
Gregory
Barker: Absolutely not. If the hon. Member for Bury, North
wants to talk about the low levels of recycling that the Government
inherited, let us examine the levels of recycling that the previous
Government
inherited from the Government before them. We must start looking
forward. Historical parallels and analogies do not get us
anywhere. The
hon. Gentleman is knowledgeable in such matters and, as a member of the
Environmental Audit Committee, he does a lot of work. I encourage him
to consider some of the recycle bank work in north America. Dramatic
results have been achieved, simply by the use of incentives. That was
pioneered not by public money, but private finance. Within one
financial year, it has been possible to generate significant amounts of
value, which have been returned to the local residents. If the will is
there, such results are possible. If we do not allow councils to have a
fall-back in the first instance of large sticks as well as carrots, we
will end up devising a much more entrepreneurial, incentive-driven
system. I
am not arguing that we would rule out a philosophical moratorium
whereby, if the process did not work, we would not go down the road of
financial penalties. However, given where we are today in 2008 with a
sceptical public, with people uncertain about how they view the
Government and local government when it comes to imposing additional
burdens, it is really important that we take the public with us and do
not accept underperforming councils or those local authorities that are
more likely to rely on the additional revenue raised from sticks and do
not concentrate on extracting the value that the carrots would produce.
To win the day, we must first go down the road of
incentives.
Martin
Horwood: I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman about
incentive schemes and their potential. It is much more important to
concentrate on carrots, not sticks. However, I am having difficulty
relating his argument to the amendments. I am trying to work out where
it is that a scheme that focused on incentives rather than penalties is
actually prevented in the Bill. Is the hon. Gentleman arguing against
the permissive powers to run the pilots that might test these
incentives in the United
Kingdom?
Gregory
Barker: That is exactly what I am doing. I am saying that
I am against permissive powers that would allow councils to penalise
those who do not recycle; that is exactly what I am doing. I thought
that I had made that
clear.
Martin
Horwood: I am sorry, but that is not my question. My
question is where does it say in the Bill that incentive schemes are
prevented.
Gregory
Barker: I did not say that the Bill is preventing
incentive schemes. I am in favour of incentive schemes, and I am not
discussing an amendment on incentive schemes, but I am against
financial penalties. Amendment No. 107 states that the
Bill “does
not include a power to create a criminal penalty on any householder for
non-compliance with any aspect of a waste reduction
scheme.’.”
That is my
point.
New clause 18
would remove the ability to levy penalties charged on waste and instead
encourages positive public engagement through the offer of rewards for
waste reduction through council taxes.
There are a
couple of other points that I want to make very briefly. Variable
charging can be regressive, and it is easy to forget the impact that it
can have on larger families who have to produce more waste than a
childless couple. Also, it is not as easy for people living in flats
and apartments to recycle as much as those living in houses, who have
plenty of storage and access to multiple separate bins.
These issues
must be carefully considered, and I do not think that anybody has come
up with a really satisfactory answer as to how we encourage recycling
in buildings of multiple occupation and large blocks of flats. Before
the Government race off down the track of giving councils the power to
levy penalties, we ought to think through solutions to those problems
first—those problems are largely responsible for the very poor
performance of our largest metropolitan areas in recycling tables. So I
would appreciate the Minister’s assurance that the Government
are working hard on researching solutions to those problems, as well as
falling back on financial penalties.
Also, there
is worrying evidence that imposing waste charges may in fact have a
detrimental effect on the local environment, due to an increase in
fly-tipping as people move to avoid the new financial penalties. We
have all spoken about the dangers of fly-tipping and how it is totally
unacceptable; the Minister herself spoke with particular passion on the
subject on Tuesday. Since variable charging was introduced in the
Republic of Ireland, 40 per cent. of households now admit to burning
some of their own rubbish, which has a significant effect on local
dioxin emissions.
So we must be
certain that, if we were to introduce such a charging scheme in the UK,
we would not be indirectly either increasing the cost of living for
certain families, unintentionally damaging the local environment or
generally putting the public off recycling, which is a project that I
believe the vast majority of British people are positively predisposed
towards. However, if we jump in and dominate the recycling agenda, as
it will be given the media’s interest in the issue, with
financial penalties and fines, we will be sending out the wrong
messages to a public who are otherwise predisposed towards being
constructive and working with us.
That is why
new clause 18 would remove the ability to levy penalty charges on waste
and instead encourages positive public engagement through the offer of
rewards for waste reduction through council tax.
Debate
adjourned.—[Siobhain
McDonagh.] Adjourned
accordingly at one minute to Five o’clock till Tuesday 8
July at half-past Ten
o’clock.
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