Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-30)
MR STEPHEN
HALE AND
MR RUSSELL
MARSH
4 DECEMBER 2007
Q20 Chairman: Do you think we need
a more sympathetic attitude from the Treasury to respond to these
kinds of crises which have affected DEFRA this summer?
Mr Hale: It is not just about
sympathy. I think the Stern Review set out an absolutely clear
and pretty compelling case for more spending in the short-term.
That does not just mean DEFRA but it means much more investment
through BERR, through research and development, and much more
spending through DFID on adaptation. There is a whole series of
implications of this but the overall trend, the overall pattern,
is one where you must see increased spending. In those parts of
DEFRA which are responsible for tackling climate change domestically,
there is a consensus in many places, including government, that
we need to see much more effort on energy efficiency and clearly
we require spending to support that. There was a series of announcements
in the Prime Minister's speech about the creation of a green homes
service, which would cover not just climate change but also other
issues like waste and recycling, and that will require spending
to make it real and to enable it to deliver.
Q21 Jo Swinson: I take it from the
exchanges that you are pleased to see the pilot scheme included
as a provision in the Climate Change Bill but there is a real
issue about people's acceptance of such schemes. We saw at the
time of the May elections that alternate weekly collections are
a politically sensitive issue. How do you think a move can be
made to something like that without alienating people and, instead,
bringing people and local councils to go down that route?
Mr Hale: I do not think that fortnightly
collection is the same as variable charging. There clearly has
been a reaction. To take up the last point, I would not claim
to understand it well enough to comment on the scale of it. It
is in part a media phenomenon—there was some good cheap
copy in this issue—but it is also, clearly, an issue of
real public concern: there have been real cases of instances of
more vermin and so on. I think fortnightly collection is a public
issue. I do not think variable charging per se needs to
relate to that issue.
Q22 Jo Swinson: Obviously I accept
there are issues but it does become emotive. For example, the
issue this week, is: when people feel they are already paying
their council tax, why should they have to pay more? The political
lesson is that if you mess with people's bins, they tend not to
like it. How can councils get over that to introduce this, if
this is going to be used as one of the levers for driving down
waste and landfill?
Mr Hale: I think we have messed
with people's bins. In some places they now have five bins. I
am sure people would once have sat around this table here and
said that it would be inconceivable to imagine the public doing
such a thing. We have now reached a point in public understanding,
of public acceptance, that in many parts of the country, in many
streets, it is socially unacceptable not to have your recycling
out, not to have it well separated, not to be part of what is
now a very general, widely understood trend. I do not believe
that we cannot achieve a similar shift in relation to variable
charging. It is important, obviously, that the Government gets
our message about what it is and is not doing here. There was
a lot of scaremongering around this. The idea was that this was
going to happen everywhere—which is not true. There was
the idea that it was going to raise far more money than it does
at present—when the Government guidelines are quite clear
that each local authority cannot raise more money through variable
charging than it has in the past. Those householders who recycle
more and put less waste to landfill could financially gain from
this and there is obviously a big job to be done to communicate
that to householders and to voters. It is not helped by newspapers
and parties who misrepresent a lot of that and say that no-one
is going to get their bins collected and there is going to be
fly-tipping absolutely everywhere, we are all going to pay more.
None of those things are true and if people believe they are true
then clearly they are not going to be very supportive of variable
charging.
Q23 Jo Swinson: Do you think the
key to this is good communication from the Government, local government
and the public?
Mr Hale: I think the key is getting
it across to the public what the facts are. That is quite a challenge
at the moment, given the heat that has been generated by this
issue. Just to take one example, I remember a little while ago
that the minutes of a cabinet sub-committee discussing this issue
were leaked and one of the founding principles of the conversation
as reported in the minutes was that this should not be designed
in a way that would lead it to be described as a "stealth
tax". The Sunday Times ran a story once they got the
document with the headline "Government to Introduce New Stealth
Tax". If you are faced with that kind of reporting it is
quite difficult to get the facts across.
Q24 Mr Graham Stuart: There is probably
a legitimate area of concern about this. I was sitting on the
Select Committee on Communities and Local Government when it conducted
an inquiry into this and, it is true, it attracted a lot of quite
alarmist copy but, nevertheless, we raised legitimate concerns
about moving away from the weekly collection of food and about
the issue Jo mentioned of double taxation. In effect, waste collection
is one of the main things that people think they are already paying
council tax for and if there is charging on top of that means
people are paying more, so it is not an entirely alarmist idea,
even if there are some rebates or some compensations for them.
Is there not a risk here that if you push an area like this, where
there is clear public concern and clear concern amongst other
bodies, you risk undermining the support for green taxation and
for things like recycling?
Mr Hale: The Government has proposed
five pilots in five areas and it will be a matter for local authorities
to decide if they want to come forward. If nobody comes forward,
then clearly we will not have much evidence on which to base these
kinds of exchanges. I hope that five local authorities will come
forward. They will clearly have to design schemes that are consistent
with the Government's rules so that people in those areas will
understand that they as a community will not pay more in total
as a result of this scheme. In the real world, in those areas
some people will financially benefit from their commitment to
recycling. That will, I hope, introduce some kind of evidence
base and some fact into what is obviously a very lively debate.
Mr Marsh: In these initial proposals
we were concerned that the perception of this would of something
that was running parallel to and separate from council tax, which
would effectively be seen as double taxation or double payment.
But the Climate Change Bill does allow a council to link it to
council tax, so they are now saying that you could get a rebate
of your council tax if you were to recycle. There has been some
movement on that and, hopefully, that will enable a better message
to be communicated. It is not talking about charging you twice
for the same thing; it is saying that if you do reduce the amount
of waste you put to landfill through increasing your recycling
you will pay less council tax. There is evidence in other areas
that that kind of message, that by doing something you can pay
less council tax, does drive quite a lot of activity.
Q25 Mr Caton: The Green Alliance
has argued for some time for a product tax on environmentally
damaging or hard to recycle products where there is a clear cleaner/greener
alternative. Are there any signs that the Government, particularly
the Treasury, are coming on board with your way of thinking?
Mr Marsh: No, is the short answer.
We have not seen any evidence, despite, as you say, calling for
it and looking at evidence from around other countries, that there
is at the moment any appetite within Treasury to look at product
taxes seriously.
Q26 Mr Caton: Do you have any idea
why that is? It seems eminently sensible to most people, I would
have thought.
Mr Marsh: I think it is because
the taxation issue is very sensitive. The Treasury do not want
to be seen as saying, all of a sudden, "We'll start putting
more taxes on things that people want to buy." For a tax
on disposable cameras, taxes on batteries, the sorts of things
you could look at introducing product taxes on, there is no desire
in the Treasury to start looking at increasing those taxes. Also,
I am not necessarily sure they have the evidence base to demonstrate
the tax would work, but we are trying to look across at other
countries where they have introduced product taxes on certain
products and have really shifted behaviour.
Q27 Mr Caton: Do you think not biting
this bullet is one of the reasons so many people are not taking
climate change as seriously as they perhaps should? If the Government
is saying, on the one hand, that climate change is the biggest
challenge facing us and, on the other, that putting a tax on disposable
cameras is something that cannot be used to help us move that
forward, that does not seem to be a very consistent message.
Mr Marsh: It does go back to Stephen's
opening point in terms of the general view of the Treasury. At
the moment it is not clear that the Treasury really is moving
in the direction you want it to go. In lots of areas and, as I
say, particularly product taxes, you would have thought that,
given in the waste agenda and from the climate change agenda we
need to start getting people to change and buy different products,
that using carrots and sticks in terms of taxation on the one
hand and reducing tax on the other as a way of driving that behaviour
would be where they are going. But it is not clear that they are
yet thinking in that frame of mind.
Q28 Jo Swinson: Last year this Committee
recommended a tax being imposed on plastic bags. The Treasury
is not keen on that and cites the Irish experience, where there
is conflicting evidence but certainly some which points to the
use of heavier plastic bags instead. What are your views on this
issue?
Mr Hale: More or less as you have
indicated. Where we are starting to see some of the supermarkets
taking action on plastic bags by charging for them and so on,
you do see people changing their behaviour. It indicates that
some kind of across-the-board tax would be useful in terms of
reducing the use of plastic, but we do need to think it through
a little more carefully as to what are some of the consequences
of that. You have highlighted a couple. That could mean a switch
to paper bags but it may not be better in terms of the carbon
impact, because of where they come from and the transport that
may be involved, to produce them rather than the plastic alternative
and there is an indication that people are prepared to pay more
for a thicker plastic bag that they will then re-use. It may be
that a plastic bag tax is the answer. It may be part of the answer.
Going back to the waste point, where you have local authorities
who are starting to collect food waste, if supermarkets provided
plastic bags that were biodegradable, you could take your shopping
home in them and then use those plastic bags in your food bins
to collect your food waste which could then be collected. It is
not just about saying that we need to impact on and stop people
using plastic bags; it is thinking about some of the other alternatives
and what role a plastic bag tax has within that.
Q29 Jo Swinson: The Prime Minister
recently spoke about eliminating single-use disposable bags. Are
you aware of any follow-up to this?
Mr Marsh: Not at the moment. He
is clearly trying to do it through a voluntary agreement rather
than anything else. The discussions have just started. Clearly
at the moment there is this thing called the Courtauld Agreement
which is taking retailers in a particular way and it is not quite
clear how this commitment that the Prime Minister has made fits
with that. The discussions are just at the early stages of how
these things will be delivered.
Q30 Jo Swinson: This is one of the
things, like weekly waste collections, that gets screeds and screeds
of press coverage. Do you think there is a danger that by focusing
on this as some great environmental issue, when the environmental
impact of plastic bags is not necessarily the biggest challenge
that we have and we could channel that same energy into reducing
packaging or whatever else, that we distract from some of the
more important issues?
Mr Hale: I think that is one of
the reasons why we do not have a plastic bag tax: the argument
that this is not a sufficiently significant part of the waste
stream to merit any intervention, and, if we are really concerned,
why do we not have a tax on disposable nappies—which I can
imagine is politically less attractive but empirically is a much
greater proportion of the waste stream. The case for a plastic
bag tax, which needs to be designed and thought about, as Russell
said, in broad and strategic terms, does not rest simply on the
proportion of the waste stream represented by plastic bags; it
has become, rightly or wrongly, quite a totemic issue and a symbol,
if you like, of where they were willing to shift our behaviour
and whether consumers and government between them can figure out
a way to do that. I think it is very important for that reason
that we see this through and we get a success. In the end, the
real issue, in volume terms, is what is in the plastic bags and
what happens to it rather than the bag itself. For me it is still
an important issue and I do not think we should use that argument
extensively in whatever way.
Chairman: Thank you very much. That is
very helpful.
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