Mr.
Gummer: We have been trying throughout, with a certain
amount of amusement in between, to reach a consensual answer on the
issue. The crucial matter is that there are modern means of encouraging
people to do things, which are more attractive to many households than
the traditional ways of reducing council tax and all the rest, because
they are immediate and fit in with other things that householders do,
with television and the like.
I
hope the Minister will undertake to ensure that at least one of the
pilots would try to use a voucher system or something similar, to see
whether that raised the participation of a wider range of families. We
should not allow the whole business to become the purview of particular
kinds of families from particular backgrounds. In the work that I have
been doing, I have found that the most difficult thing is how to
increase recycling in, for example, disadvantaged areas. It may be that
the mechanism before us would have the effect in this country that it
has had in the United States.
Joan
Ruddock: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for
that intervention. If I may, I shall explain our attitude to the new
clause in a logical sequence and then come to his point. It seems to
make little sense to allow waste disposal authorities to require
billing authorities to reduce council tax, while requiring that the
waste disposal authority should reimburse the billing authority for
both the lost council tax revenue and the costs of bringing the scheme
about, which is what is proposed. It seems unlikely that a waste
disposal authority would ever choose to do that.
The
provisions for linking rebates and charges made under an incentive
scheme to council tax are set out in schedule 5 and already allow
authorities to net rebates off council tax bills. The rebates and
charges made under a scheme are designed to incentivise sustainable
behaviour on waste. There is no need to consider changes to the
underlying council tax liability and it is not Government policy that
the schemes should do so. I need to set that on the record because it
has not been debated. The provisions in the Bill and the framework that
we intend to establish in regulations will ensure transparency and
fairness for householders, and will ensure that councils may link the
administration of their scheme to council tax if they wish. We will
consult fully on the detail of the regulations relating to council tax.
We do not believe that anything more is required.
I turn to the
issues about which the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle spoke. He
wants only reward schemes under the Bill. As I said at the outset, such
schemes can be established under the proposals in the Bill
and, perhaps even more significantly, do not require new legislation.
Right hon. and hon. Members may not be aware that
DEFRA has already carried out major incentive-only and reward-only
schemes involving a significant number of authorities. There were 53
fully reported trials, of which 30 found that they had a positive
impact in increasing the tonnages of recyclables collected. I am pretty
certain that those reward-only schemes included vouches in some cases.
I may need to check whether they were actual vouchers or prizes, as it
were, but there was not a council tax reduction or anything of that
kind. They did not have a monetary
value.
Mr.
Gummer: I am sorry to have introduced the matter rather
earlier than I ought to have done. I apologise to the Minister. I want
her to be very
vulgar. 12
noon
Joan
Ruddock: Could I be
vulgar?
Mr.
Gummer: I would like the Minister to be vulgar. The
problem with the whole issue is that we forget that most people find it
boring, not terribly interesting and
not essential to their lives. We, who are involved, have become much
more interested in it. How do we make people keen on it? We should use
mechanisms that those selling mass-produced, household goods learned
about long ago. Vouchers should be available that are used in the same
way as “buy one, get one free” offers. I want to make
sure that we go down that line, and that people can take something into
a shop and get something cheaper because of it. I do not mind what sort
of shop or circumstance, but please can we make sure that that is an
element of what we are trying to do? I know about the earlier schemes,
but they were tentative and slightly nice. We want a bit of vulgarity,
and the Minister to be straight down the line as if she were the
marketing boss of a major soap company.
Joan
Ruddock: I am intrigued by the right hon. Gentleman
inviting me to be vulgar. I hope that I am not capable of doing that,
but I shall obviously
try. Whatever
the right hon. Gentleman thinks about the schemes and their being timid
or not, there were a lot of them. Local authorities came forward and
volunteered to undertake what were a considerable variety of schemes.
All I am saying to Conservative Front Benchers is that such a scheme
has been tried in this country. We saw a rise in recycling in 30 of the
53 trials. There was a positive impact, but the difficulty was that the
magnitude of the increase varied widely. It was hard to separate out
the extent to which the particular reward, rather than the education,
information and exhortation, increased recycling rates. As the scheme
took place some years ago, rates were much lower, so there was greater
scope for easy increases.
Gregory
Barker: Apart from exhortation and education, a key role
is played by the mechanism for collecting recyclates. If it is overly
complex or requires too much effort on the part of the consumer,
take-up will suffer. I urge the hon. Lady to look at the pilots in the
USA—and perhaps not at the historic examples in which DEFRA has
taken part—to see how the combination of vouchers plus effective
collection produces such positive
results.
Joan
Ruddock: We have looked extensively at north America and
its different schemes, such as the rewards-only and the
rewards-and-charges schemes, as we have at continental Europe. I shall
make a point of looking at the example that the hon. Gentleman gave of
Wilmington, how long it has been happening and how sustainable it is.
Participation rates can be raised easily and quickly by giving people
vouchers, but how is that sustained for years on end? Where do the
commercial interests lie in offering the rewards and vouchers? How
sustainable is that? Does it raise competition issues in due course?
Many factors would have to be considered if a scheme was based entirely
on a commercial interest being allied with a public service. We must be
sustainable and constantly increase recycling rates, not just have a
burst of activity with a good result. We need to do
more. Having
considered all the research, I was advised strongly that, if we want to
increase recycling rates substantially and in a sustainable way, we
need to look to the continental and north American examples that
involve both rewards and charges. That is why, informed by all that
research, we have brought forward proposals to try out five pilots in
this country.
Mr.
Gummer: I ask the Minister to remember where her advice is
coming from. It is coming from people who are universally unconnected
with private industry. She is being advised by civil servants who,
charming and able though they are, have specifically chosen not to be
part of the private sector. She is being advised by local authority
people who are in the same position. The American example is very
interesting. In fact, it is sustainable, and is the basis of a now
nationwide provision. It is supported by major companies and it really
has a result.
I do not
suggest that the Minister should take this on alone. I merely say that
it would be silly if we produced an exciting idea but did not find a
way of testing it ourselves. There is a worry about where our advice
comes from. When I was in her position I had no idea, because there was
a certain filtering of information, how much was being done
commercially in both continental Europe and the United States. I hope
that we will be given the opportunity to do this. I do not care two
hoots who does it. I want to achieve it. But this line of vulgarity is
important because otherwise the expansion of recycling is restricted to
particular sections of the community, which is a great
sadness.
Joan
Ruddock: I hope that we can satisfy the right hon.
Gentleman. We will clearly look at all the schemes that come forward.
As he said, we may need to do some additional work ourselves in order
to inject some further ideas into the process. I am more than happy to
consider that. He would be entirely wrong, however, if he thought that
I spent all my time talking to civil servants and people from local
government. I have a significant number of meetings with entirely
commercial interests. The civil servants involved also have a great
deal of dialogue, particularly in these fields, with manufacturers and
retailers. There is no ideological reason for us to be opposed to the
sort of proposition that the right hon. Gentleman
makes. This
is where we are. We believe that we need the possibility of pilots that
involve both rewards and charges. That is the provision in the Bill,
but it does not mean that we cannot do reward only—I must make
that absolutely clear. All moneys raised in charges must be returned to
residents as a whole, so that the overall burden on householders will
not increase. That is an important point. Using words such as
“penalties” and “fines” suggests that it is
a new imposition on residents as a whole. It certainly is not. It is a
reward-and-charge scheme and a rebate-and-charge scheme, in which no
moneys accrue either to the Exchequer or to local government. That is a
very important
point. New
clause 18 does not introduce any useful new powers. New clause 22
removes the current provisions which allow authorities to issue rebates
and charges to householders according to the amount of waste that they
throw away, thereby permitting reward-based schemes only. As I have
just said in relation to new clause 18, schedule 5 already allows
authorities to run such reward-only schemes. Rebates could be netted
off council tax bills or paid to householders directly. Indeed, the
powers also allow for other types of financial payments, including
vouchers, which new clause 22 specifically seeks to allow. As neither
new clause 18 nor new clause 22 would replace schedule 5, but would
merely add superfluous material, they must both be
opposed.
David
Maclean: Before my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and
Battle perhaps chooses not to press the amendments in my name, I want
to say a few concluding words. The Minister asked whether I would be
pleased if we chose not to pursue my amendments, and I am not pleased
at all, but that may not prevent me from declining to press them
further.
Amendment No.
109 is not a wrecking amendment—none of my amendments on the
amendment paper are intended to wreck the Bill. We are talking about a
pilot scheme, and I have tabled probing amendments outlining what I
thought were genuine pilot schemes. I agree with the hon. Member for
Northavon that it is daft to restrict ourselves to just five schemes,
when we could have four or six or seven. Yes, there is a cost involved,
so we cannot have 200, but why restrict ourselves to five if they are
pilot schemes?
I thought
that the pilot schemes were intended to test not only the financial
charging and penalty mechanisms, but whether councils could do the
difficult recycling tasks that the rest of us cannot do. Instead, all
that we have heard is that they will test charges, rebates and fixed
penalties for householders who do not get things right. Local
authorities will therefore not be encouraged to introduce pilots to
deal with the huge amount of stuff that we cannot recycle—the
Tetra Paks of this world. I am not totally obsessed with Tetra Paks,
except in the sense that when I go to recycle them, nobody wants to
take them. I cannot put them in the cardboard box, the foil box or the
plastic box. If I go to the recycling centre, warnings tell me not to
stick them in any of the containers.
Local
councils have got me running up and down the stairs sorting out all
their rubbish for them, and we the householders are doing their dirty
work by putting our recycling into separate boxes, but when it comes to
the difficult stuff, they just do not want to know—they do not
want to take the things that they find it difficult to recycle. In my
ignorance, I had assumed that at least one or two of the pilot schemes
would test volunteer councils that came along and said,
“We’ve got a system for dealing with the polystyrenes of
this world and with the composite materials—the cardboard and
the foil together and the plastic and the paper together. Minister, can
we have a go at testing it out because we can take the stuff that most
other councils aren’t taking? Here’s our charging
regime.”
Joan
Ruddock: A council will be perfectly free to say that it
wants to do that in its pilot. Its proposal might be the most
successful if it offers much more. Everything is
possible.
David
Maclean: I am delighted to hear it, but that was not the
message that I got from the Minister earlier. She suggested that our
proposals would be rejected because they would compel every council in
the country to recycle everything. Of course, I do not want the
provisions and the pilot schemes to do that, but we must draft such
probing amendments to explore the Minister’s intentions in
Committee.
I will
happily sit down now if the Minister tells us that the pilot schemes
will offer positive encouragement to councils—it may be one or
two councils—to come forward with ideas about how to recycle the
stuff that most councils do not want to touch because it is too
difficult to handle. We must solve that problem.
There is no point in the Minister introducing five schemes if they test
only the charging incentives, the penalties and ways of clobbering the
local community charge payer. Surely a pilot scheme must test the
mechanics to see whether councils can recycle stuff that others
cannot. My
right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal is right that there
is a danger that the whole recycling issue will get stuck not in a
class system, but with the people who are already attuned to it, who
are already recycling and who probably already have a lower carbon
footprint. The issue should not be the preserve of puritanical
liberals—luckily, we do not have too many of them in my
constituency. We know what puritanical liberals are like: they put
their plastic bottles through the dishwasher to make sure that they are
clean, they put their wet newspapers through the tumble-dryer to get
them dry, they load everything into their diesel Volvo and they go down
to the recycling centre. If that is what turns them on on a Saturday
night, good luck to them, but there are more exciting things to do in
Hexham and Penrith. [Interruption.] My right hon.
Friend wanted vulgarity and he has got it.
The serious
point—I apologise for that excessive levity—is that we
must make things easier for people. I am getting fed up with recycling.
I believe in it, but I am getting sick to the back teeth of having to
separate everything out and do the council’s dirty work when it
will not take the stuff that I find it most difficult to cope with.
What is the point of a district council if it cannot deal with those
things, even on a pilot
study? 12.15
pm The
Minister has heard my plea. If the clauses need a slight tweaking on
Report, I beg the Government to give her the flexibility and the
freedom to have four, six or seven pilots, and to have some pilot
schemes that will deal with the rubbish and the recycling materials
that no one else wants. She will have my full support. I am happy to go
along with my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle if he
wishes to withdraw my amendments, on the basis of the firm assurances
from the
Minister.
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