The
Chairman: Order. I will suspend the sitting for five
minutes. 6.52
pm Sitting
suspended. 6.58
pm On
resuming—
Steve
Webb: The Liberal Democrats have an established party
policy in favour of a levy on plastic bags, which was passed at our
conference some years ago. We are broadly sympathetic with the new
clause, new schedule and Government amendments and will not seek to
obstruct
them. However,
before the Committee approves the new measures, we should be slightly
clearer about exactly what we are voting for. This is not exactly a pig
in a plastic bag but it is something of that sort, because a great deal
of detail still has to be established. I accept that the Minister says
that we will pass primary legislation, that there will then be
consultation and secondary legislation, and that we will have to return
to some of the issues, but it would be helpful to know now what the
Government are thinking about some of
them. My
understanding of the principle is that there will be no requirement to
place a levy if there is sufficient voluntary reduction—I
believe that that was the phrase that the Minister used. She mentioned
a 25 per cent. figure, but it would be interesting to know whether the
Government are now clear in their own mind how much progress must be
made, over what time scale, and whether it will be reviewed
annually—the whole mechanism. How much is enough? I would hope
that “enough” would be an ambitious
target. We
have already heard about Ireland and other places where the reductions
have been dramatic and fast. I hope that the Minister will set the bar
high because if we are going to go through the process of putting the
infrastructure in place, we might as well ensure that we get bang for
our buck. I hope that the Minister will give us some idea of the
Government’s thinking on
charges. The
hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle said that there was an issue about
the use of revenue. The Bill is not explicit about what the use of the
revenue would be. I am also slightly unclear about the funding flow.
Presumably, there will be lots of people levying the charges. Do they
all hand over the money to some sort of clearing house that then gives
out grants or something? It is not clear how this will work. Having
been required to make a charge, it would seem a bit odd if the
individual companies were allowed to pick and choose their good causes.
Again, the measure is a bit hazy and I do not know how it will work.
Some further clarification would be helpful.
The coverage
of the levy is unclear, but perhaps the Government have not yet made a
decision. For example, my village shop issues carrier bags and I am not
sure whether the Government have a de minimis threshold in mind.
Clearly, the village shop’s carrier bags are as littering as
everyone else’s. However, if my village shop had to keep a
register of how many carrier bags it had handed out and how many 5ps it
had charged customers, and if it would have to send in accounts on a
form to DEFRA, it would make me wonder about the relative costs and
benefits of the proposal. Is the measure aimed at the big supermarkets?
Do the Government know where the cut-off point is? Those are very
important
questions. I
welcome the fact that the new schedule refers not only to carrier bags
handed out in shops, but bags profligately used for home delivery. It
is very important that those bags are within the scope of the
legislation.
Although I
agree with the basic approach, I have sneaking reservations about the
switch from a voluntary to a statutory strategy. It is perfectly
legitimate to try to do this on a voluntary basis. There is also a
credible argument for saying, “Let us just get on with it and
make it happen.” However, I am not sure about trying a voluntary
approach, and then revoking it early on. When we intervened on the
Minister to ask how the voluntary approach was working, she said that
she had some ballpark figures. However, although she did not seem to
have much idea, the decision to revoke the voluntary approach and put
some stick in was taken months ago. Therefore, long before the
Government knew how the voluntary approach was getting on—they
cannot have had hard data on it months ago—they decided to go
for a statutory approach.
As the right
hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal said, the only thing that can be
assumed is that the Government were responding to newspaper pressure.
While the Daily Mail has its merits, it should not be
determining the law of the land in the way in which it seems to have
done in this case. We did not intervene on the Minister to say that we
do not think that action needs to be taken in this area. Clearly there
is a case for action, as our party advocated some years before the
Daily Mail. The concern is that we have either a big picture
climate change Bill that is strategic and sets frameworks, or we have a
systematic strategy of specific legislation to tackle big climate
change issues. It seems to me that with this Bill we have neither fish
nor foul. We have what is supposed to be a measure to establish global
targets for decades to come, and then it addresses bin taxes and
plastic bags. The worry is that we do not have the strategic approach
from Government telling us where our legislative priorities are and
where the big climate change impact is—the bang for our buck. We
just have responses to the flavour of the moment. That does not seem to
be a wholly satisfactory basis on which to legislate.
We have the
Bill in front of us and we have got to form an opinion. Our judgment is
that these powers need to be available. We hope that the bar will be
set high so that we can be confident that drastic reductions in the
numbers of plastic bags, which are clearly possible, as other countries
have shown, will be achieved in this
country.
Mr.
Gummer: Again, I would like to refer to my entry in the
Register of Members’ Interests, not least because I chair a
company that deals with a high proportion of
requirements under packaging legislation. We have also advised a number
of companies on how best to fulfil what I believe is the corporate
responsibility to reduce the amount of waste that we use in this
country. Like
other people, I am perfectly happy to say that we must do something
about the nature of the society in which we live. This is a throw-away
society, and we have gone through a period of time in which we have
contravened all the rules that were previously part of our nature. We
always used to refer to “waste not, want not” and I hear
that idea coming back in relation to the Prime Minister’s
comments.
We always
thought that people went shopping with a shopping bag, put the items in
there and came back with them. That idea was thrown away because people
thought it was terribly old-fashioned, but we have returned to seeing
the value of that approach. I feel it is a much healthier society that
takes the view that wastage is of itself wrong and damaging to the
environment. I do not want to be in any way critical of the principles
that lie behind the measure, but I still find the presence of this
aspect of the Bill very difficult to accept. It is as if we are at some
fantastic liturgy where everything is leading up to the great moment in
which we really show the centre of what we are going to depend on for
the rest of our lives, and then just as we come to the end, somebody
gets up and says, “I’d just like to announce that
there’ll be tea after the service in the parish
rooms”—somehow or other that is not actually the best
bit. I do not think that the Minister for the Environment is terribly
happy with this addition to his important
Bill. The
Minister and the Under-Secretary will no doubt deny this, but I have a
feeling that they believe the Bill is about something bigger and that
the measure is merely a convenient thing to put on the end. The measure
is no more about climate change than a whole lot of other things. Of
course, it contributes to the battle, but it is largely about litter
and a new attitude to waste, with which most of us agree. It is
therefore not something that I wish to destroy. However, in the whole
battle against climate change, there is a need to elevate the issue so
that people recognise that dealing with it demands something very
considerable of us and is not merely a matter of bits and
pieces. Secondly,
I have a concern about the distinction between our argument about how
terribly important it is to give large businesses time to work out how
they will measure their carbon footprint and how, after we have had a
few months of a voluntary agreement, we immediately have to bring in a
system to clobber them because we are not sure that they are going to
deliver. In addition, we do not know in detail what has been done.
There is a certain contrast between those two things. Does that have
anything to do with the way in which the public view has been both
influencing the press and influenced by the press?
That leads me
to the third point. I am sorry that this bit about plastic and paper
bags is so limited because I would have thought that this was the
moment to push the boundaries. It is interesting that many of the
newspapers that are keen on taxing plastic bags are themselves
delivered in a plastic bag. Why have we not extended the measure to
cover that? What about saying that the legislation should apply to a
wide range of uses of plastic that manifestly contribute to litter and
add to greenhouse gases?
I think, too,
of the packets in which parliamentary papers are sent out—they
no longer come in what was rather better packaging, but in plastic,
which seems largely unnecessary. I do not know whether you have
noticed, Mr. Atkinson, but in the old days, the bound
volumes of parliamentary reports came in very useful boxes, in which
most of my back papers are now filed. Somebody somewhere, without any
discussion with anyone, decided that the parliamentary reports would be
packaged differently, which has had two results: first, they come
damaged; and, secondly, the packaging cannot be reused, which is a more
important mechanism than recycling. I am sorry that that has happened,
because I like to apply rules to ourselves
first.
Anne
Snelgrove: Is the right hon. Gentleman talking about the
19th or the 20th
century?
Mr.
Gummer: Perhaps the hon. Lady, who has so far voted
against her conscience on a number of issues, could be a little more
serious. During the short time that she has been, and will be, in
Parliament—[ Hon. Members: “Ooh!]
Well, we have had a good conversation so far, but I do not think that
her intervention was a very useful contribution. Our bound papers used
to be delivered in perfectly reasonable boxes that we could reuse, but
about nine months ago, there was a change to a new form of packaging
that we cannot use again. We now have to throw it away, or at least
recycle it, which is a pity. For those of us who try to address matters
of recycling, that is just another complicated
issue. Above
all, it is very dangerous for the Government to base legislation on a
popular, but possibly momentary, concern. The measure would send out a
warning, but I am not sure that when enacted it will prove to be so
popular. It is the sort of legislation that people are keen on only for
as long as it does not actually happen—attitudes are always
different before something actually happens. The Government should do
one of two things: take no action, which I think would be wrong, or,
preferably, say, “We will make this our own. We will not simply
respond to a newspaper campaign, but establish a basis for a much wider
view of how to reduce waste in
packaging.” Reducing
waste in many parts of the packaging industry is a real operation. I
declared an interest in this matter, and Valpak is very concerned about
reducing the creation of packaging in the first place, which is what we
try to do. However, we are not moving fast enough in certain areas
where the Government might have provided some encouragement. I have
given a couple of examples already: the increased use of unnecessary
plastic packaging around other things simply because it happens to be
convenient for the distribution of newspapers and the like, and the
question of whether we ought to be using as many plastic coverings for
materials that were previously covered in more easily recycled
materials.
I see no
indication in the new clause that those issues have been considered or
that legislative opportunities have been taken to give powers to the
Government to intervene. I am sorry that that opportunity has been
missed. The Government ought to think very seriously about how to bring
together the voluntary and the compulsory, and I think that the hon.
Member for Northavon was on to something when he sought to distinguish
between them. There is no doubt that some
of the companies that have sought voluntarily to reduce the number of
bags that they use have found it an interesting and valuable way of
coming together with their customers and talking seriously about the
issues—it has been a point of contact. The effect is that the
whole concept of the collection of material for recycling and waste and
such like has become
important. 7.15
pm Reports
from checkout girls and boys, store managers and others have been
interesting, and that is true across most of the retail trade. The
situation is different for different kinds of products. Interestingly,
the stories that one hears from the suppliers of clothes are different
from those from grocery suppliers. In all cases, however, there appears
to be a real advantage in there being a degree of voluntarism because
it might have a longer effect upon people’s general method of
treating waste. We need to change attitudes, and doing that on a
slightly longer trajectory might mean that more people’s
attitudes will be changed for a longer time. I beg the Under-Secretary
to make sure that in any change that she or her successors seek to
make, serious consideration is given to not just the size of the
reduction in the number of bags, but how much we have used that
reduction to change habits and attitudes. Taking a bit longer might
have a more lasting and broader effect than the immediate impact of
getting rid of the one-trip plastic bag.
Lastly, I
commend those companies that have produced a wonderful business in
providing bags for life, which has much enlivened the differences
between them. I have much enjoyed the reasonably good-hearted jokes as
each of the supermarket chains has sought to show that its bags are
better than those of the others. They have done all sorts of things to
get at the bags of others. It seems that, in general, that has had a
thoroughly good effect upon the manners and attitudes of
shoppers.
I hope that
we will ensure that, in so far as we can, we get the voluntary system
to do as much as it can, because I suspect that it is changing more
attitudes than almost anything else that we have done for some time. It
might need to go on for a bit before we intervene to ensure that we get
the full result, which, probably, we will not get without the use of
some of the powers that the Minister has put forward
today.
Joan
Ruddock: I seem to have an enormous number of questions to
respond to, and I will try to do so as succinctly as I can. I was
grateful for the support given by all those who have spoken, although
they have given a critique of proposals. The general principle is well
supported and we are delighted to have that support.
I begin with
the issue of whether this is a litter scheme or a climate change
scheme. I have made it clear that the scheme will have a number of
positive results, if we able to achieve what we seek to achieve, but it
is rooted in climate change. We are dealing with significant emissions,
and that is why this is in the Bill. The Irish law was based on
litter—that was the rationale. Ireland was trying to get rid of
bags for litter reasons, not other reasons. That was why there was a
lot of substitution of paper for plastic.
| 
