---

Refuse Collection

It is disappointing to see so few hon. Members in the Chamber to discuss this important subject. Individually, and leaving aside the communities to which they belong, every Member of the House of Commons generates a fair amount of waste. This is an important debate, which has been politically highly charged, although it may be on the cusp of becoming a little more sensible. When we talk about the various strategies for disposing waste, I can think of a political party somewhere that will have opposed them, while the same political party will have proposed them somewhere else. A lot of political opportunism is riding on the back of what is a serious issue for us all. The report is good in part, but I have to be slightly critical of some of its conclusions. If people consult the document, they will see that I was not present at the final stage when the text and the press release were agreed. In retrospect, I felt that a sensible report was slightly distorted in the press. The prelude to the report is fairly well understood. There has been considerable churn in refuse arrangements throughout the land, brought about by the landfill tax and the escalating burden that it imposes on local authorities, by the very genuine and serious environmental concerns relating to methane emissions and the shortageof landfill and by our horrific record of generating rubbish, because our society is extraordinarily wasteful by European standards. I think the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) described our recycling rate as rather poor. It is actually disgracefully low. Some authorities have responded with what is now referred to as the alternate weekly collection, which they couple, by and large, with an increased recycling push, generally collecting such things as bottles, paper and compostable material, which are heavy and save an appreciable amount in landfill tax for council tax payers. I accept that the option is entirely up to local authorities, in their particular circumstances, and the communities that they represent, but I must record that the strategy has been going on for some time. It dates back to 2004 and 2005. However, the debate over it really lit up when the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph weighed in and took up the issue in 2007. I concede that the Daily Mail is a brilliantly laid-out newspaper. It has an intelligent mix of articles and is very clever in what it does, but ostensibly—in fact obviously—it has agendas, and it has a particular agenda on the issue that we are discussing. As with most of the media, when there is an agenda, the facts and reporting are subsumed into it. The Daily Mail was solidly against alternate weekly collection and these days where the Daily Mail goes the BBC supinely follows, so the issue went up the political Richter scale. The Minister, when interviewed, was obviously acutely sensitive about the issue, and was hard pushed to say anything positive about it. I asked him a simple question about whether research showed as a general trend that alternate weekly collection boosts recycling. The somewhat evasive answer was:"““As a general trend, recycling has more than quadrupled since 1997””." I emphasise that I do not mean the current Minister, to whom I apologise; I am sure that she will be absolutely frank and forthright on the issue. I asked the then Minister, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw): "““Has it anything to do with the alternate weekly collection?””" He replied:"““I think the LGA has suggested that is the case. I think the LGA suggested that on average local authorities that have alternate weekly collections have 25 per cent. higher recycling rates than those that do not.””" Then quite touchingly he added:"““That is the Local Government Association saying that, please, journalists in this room, not us.””" He was obviously conscious of the effect that he might have on the media. The Committee concluded—perhaps following the Minister's evidence—that there was no direct causal link between the AWC and high rates of recycling. We said that such a direct causal link was unproven. It would not be unfair to say that the Committee's conclusion mystified the waste industry, the experts and people from organisations such as the Waste and Resources Action Programme, to whom I have spoken. Why? Because the evidence seems to show that 19 of the top 20 recycling councils use alternate weekly collection. I do not want to deliver a lecture on causality. I could, but it would detain Members for too long, and with few speakers present there is a good chance of our all getting away a little early. However, the AWC is not a necessary or sufficient condition for a high recycling rate. It is not necessary because the odd borough—usually a very middle-class borough—sometimes has high recycling rates, without the alternate weekly collection. Those are the exceptions, however. The AWC is not a sufficient condition because some local authorities introduce it so badly that it does not significantly boost recycling rates; the expected jump in rates does not happen. That is the fact; but the same is true of the connection that can be made between lung cancer and smoking. People do not need to smoke to get lung cancer; it is not a necessary condition. Furthermore, some people who smoke, such as my 86-year-old aunt, who has smoked 20 a day since she was about 16, do not get lung cancer—at least, as far as we know she has not got it. Nevertheless, smoking increases the probability of lung cancer, and the evidence seems to suggest that AWC increases the probability of higher recycling rates, because it influences choices. We can all choose to be environmentally virtuous and recycle as much as we can, but we do not invariably do so. I have bins in my room for recycling materials, and I have bins for other stuff, as do all Members. It would be nice to think that I and my staff always put recyclable material in the recycling bin, and that we do not follow the path of inertia and throw it in the nearest bin. However, from observation of my staff, myself, and other Members, that is not invariably the pattern. Our choices are influenced by our opportunities, and if our opportunities to recycle exceed our opportunities to dump, we tend to recycle more. That is usually, although, I rush to add, not invariably, a feature of the AWC. Sensibly—and this is a point on which I agree wholeheartedly with the Committee's conclusion—AWC should be part, as I am sure the Minister will say, of a package of measures including education and the opportunity to recycle, rather than the opportunity to get one's rubbish picked up less frequently than before. As the Committee said, the system must be variable according to local circumstances. Members with constituencies where there are large numbers of flats or houses in multiple occupation—or areas in their constituency with lots of flats or HMOs—will know of the necessity for tailor-made solutions for those areas and the environments where rubbish is collected. We have moved on in our understanding of what makes AWC work better, to insist that it should include food waste. We do not want people to put all their food waste down the sink, which might be the alternative to leaving it lying around for another week. We should prefer that it be collected weekly, and in the best schemes it is. We do not want it pushed down the sink or hanging about rotting—although, as the report states, we did not find evidence of increases in maggot and vermin infestation. The Committee called for more research, and it will be interesting to see what research reveals, but so far all we have to go on is anecdotal evidence. On the basis of that, we called for more research. I venture to suggest that wheelie bins present greater challenges to rats, in many areas, than the old black-bag system did. I do not know a great deal about the psychology or abilities of rats, but that is my supposition, and wheelie bins are normally part of the AWC system. I want to turn briefly to a real problem with current AWC regimes. Often, although not always, they exclude adequate arrangements for plastic and cardboard, which are big elements in the residual waste stream and are rarely collected door to door. Normally, people must travel to dump them somewhere, but they are of course by and large recyclable—not all, but most, plastic can be recycled, and certainly all cardboard. A feature of the situation is that those materials are light, so their contribution to a council's reduction in the landfill tax is relatively small. They take a lot of transporting around. If someone is carrying plastic bottles about in a lorry, they are driving a lorry full of air with not much material. There is also the environmental argument that a plastic bottle has the advantage of being chemically inert, so that it does not degenerate and give off carbon dioxide and methane emissions in landfill. The problem is a serious one for the householder, but is not so serious for the council, which is not affected in the same way as it would be by failure to recycle bottles, compostable material or other heavy stuff; although, self-evidently, compostable material need not be transported to be dealt with in an environmentally sound way. Plastic and cardboard are a transport headache for the council, requiring many lorries to shift not much, by weight, plastic and cardboard. They are a sorting headache at the end of their journey, because there are various perplexing kinds of plastic that need to be sorted by type before they can be usefully recycled and reused. They are also a disposal headache, because people do not always know of an end use for some of the products. In other words, the markets are relatively immature and insufficiently developed at present. Facilities need to be developed—I think that the Under-Secretary was alluding to this—on a sub-regional basis, so that a number of local authorities can have access to adequate ways of sorting out and making further use of unwanted plastic in particular. Encouragement is also needed from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for the end-use market. Various things are thrown out in very large quantities—for example, CDs and DVDs—that do not at present have a valid alternative use but can have one, given the right circumstances. The report is largely about collection policy and how it is carried out, but collection policy cannot be divorced from a sub-regional environmental strategy that encompasses both facilities to make use of what councils collect and end uses for the products of collection. There is a need for massive co-ordination—a job for DEFRA or whoever. If there is local decision making—a good thing which I am in favour of—but an absence of sub-regional co-ordination, the whole process will become infinitely more complex and less worth while.