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Refuse Collection

I am aware of all the problems that the various agencies that work with DEFRA and rely on it for their funding have experienced. I know that you will not want us to step outside the bounds of the debate, Mr. Amess, but we could talk about the Rural Payments Agency and various other things that have affected DEFRA's budget. As the hon. Lady focused on WRAP, I will mention the work that NISP—the national industrial symbiosis programme—is doing with larger bodies, too. It would be a great shame if that work, which has been undertaken, is not allowed to be pushed forward to effective conclusions. The hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West raised issues relating to integration of the strategies of disposal authorities and collection authorities. That is a crucial question. I have had the opportunity to visit some disposal facilities, so I have seen where recycling is sorted, in fairly unpleasant circumstances. Companies such as WRG and others are excellent employers and do a great deal to look after the work force who carry out the sorting, but inevitably it is not the most glamorous of jobs. Other authorities have concentrated on encouraging the sorting of materials at source—in other words, by the householder—which leads to an easier process further down the chain, so the hon. Lady was right to focus on that. My hon. Friend the Member for Southport, a member of the Communities and Local Government Committee, spoke strongly about his belief that alternate weekly collections have a significant role to play in meeting our targets as a nation and in terms of improving recycling rates. He made a very powerful argument for that. Although he is a philosopher, he did not delve too deeply into causality, but he made it clear that he believes that there may be a stronger link between the two than the final report or debate on it in the media may have indicated. I shall deal with some of the recommendations. There are a great number of them and although time is available to us, I sense from other Members that they may wish me not to explore every recommendation in detail, so I shall pick out just a few. The first issue is local authority targets and whether, under the new regime for local authorities, waste should automatically be one of those targets. My party welcomes the approach that the Government have taken on simplifying targets, although it remains to be seen how it will work in practice. The targets ought to be agreed as part of a bottom-up process. There are difficulties with insisting that, in all circumstances, waste ought to be one of those, although in most cases, as waste is moving up the agenda, waste issues are likely to be key targets for local authorities through their own priority setting, rather than having to be imposed from above. I think that was the Government response: they were cautious about imposing a target on all local authorities. Recommendation 3, which relates to the clear and straightforward guidelines that should be provided to householders to encourage their participation and co-operation in recycling, is very important. The Government response is that through work with WRAP they are encouraging good practice on collection systems, including advice on engagement with residents. That is important, but it does not go quite far enough in terms of providing that information. The report talks about our historical problems. Now that many flowers bloom across the country in terms of systems, it is difficult to turn the clock back and simplify things, but I hope that the possibility exists of building on WRAP's work, as the report suggests, in relation to colour coding and so on to make the system easier for people to understand. The Government response to that recommendation may not go quite far enough to meet what the Committee said about guidelines and providing clearer information to householders. The knotty problem of food waste is, in many cases, one of perception. As part of the IPT fellowship, I had occasion to visit Bracknell council and talk to the council leader—who speaks for the Local Government Association on some of these issues—about Bracknell's experiences with AWC. As my hon. Friend the Member for Southport said, if there is effective communication with local residents and people are made aware of the benefits, that will address some of the perception problems, which I think have informed some of the rumours about what might happen—the horror stories about vermin and maggot infestations and so on. People occasionally see the worst in a system if they are told that that is the likely outcome. Councils that have invested significantly in winning people over to a system before its introduction seem to have had far better results in terms of people's acceptance. That is an important lesson to be learned, whatever changes occur with waste collection. Waste is one of those services where, as long as it is working well, no one wants to talk about it or consider it. On the other hand, if there is a problem it moves quickly up the agenda. That is part of the problem. The report makes several recommendations about the need to allow local authorities flexibility to develop their own schemes. I have already referred to the need for principles that people can get used to, so that when they move from one area to another—people change jobs far more often, they move around the country more and are more mobile—they can expect to find some basic ideas in operation. My local authority of Restormel is in a rural part of north Cornwall; our circumstances are very different from those in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes). We should not expect the circumstances of collection to be the same. That is an important principle, and I am glad that the report focused on it in some detail. The issue of minimum standards is interesting. The idea that core definitions of what householders should expect from their refuse collections is to be found in recommendation 15. Encouraging people to think more about what they receive from the waste service and what contribution they can make to develop the service and make recycling more useful and effective would be most beneficial. The recommendation on incentives is a crucial part of that engagement. I turn to the question of varying charges. Unlike alternate weekly collection and promotion schemes, in which people are encouraged to look creatively at what they can do to increase recycling, the moment one starts to raise issues of finance a negative connotation is unfortunately put on it. People think that they may be worse off rather than thinking that they might be better off if they were to adapt to such a system. We should recognise that people may be able to take advantage of the system in different ways, so we must ensure that taxation does not become more aggressive. The report also deals with the small amounts involved and whether they will be significant enough to effect change. That is an important point. Treating waste as a utility is a fascinating idea. In my part of the south-west, water charges are a huge issue, but the fact that they are separate from other household charges focuses people's attention on them and has pushed people into using water meters, because they think such things are efficient. Considering waste as a utility is a tempting prospect; it could encourage people to consider how to be more efficient and thus become part of the solution, and educate them on how little we spend on waste. We have heard about the recycling rates in other countries, but in many countries people pay far more for waste collection and waste disposal than we do. We have been somewhat spoilt by the availability of landfill and the low costs that councils have managed to achieve. Although we congratulate them on the efficiencies they have been able to achieve, people have been somewhat spoiled in that respect. I would prefer councils to make more of an effort to say how little of the council tax is spent on waste. As I said earlier, it is a visible service when things go wrong, and people tend to see it as a core service and assume that a vast amount of their council tax goes towards providing it, but we know that is not the case. In fact, when I was a member of Bedford borough council, the chief executive often said that whenever he spoke to local organisations and groups that were concerned about costs, he used to lay out just how much of their council tax went on some of the key services, and they were stunned to find that they were getting such good value for money. The idea of considering waste as a utility an interesting one, but I would be cautious about fettering councils in that way. It could take away another function from local authorities, rather as education funding is now entirely discrete. It might undermine the flexibility of local authorities in that respect and I hope that the information could be provided to local residents without necessarily saying that waste collection had to be treated as a discrete system. Finally, I return to the question of recycling for small and medium-sized enterprises, particularly for new businesses and for people who have not been involved in business before, whose only experience of waste has been dealing with domestic waste. They are often surprised at the lack of accessible services for commercial recycling. There are huge gains to be made; for instance, in my constituency glass bottles could be far more effectively reused or recycled. There is more work to be done. The Communities and Local Government Committee may return to the question in future, although I know that it is considering a great many other inquiries, as the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West said, or another Select Committee may consider the matter. As well as giving answers, the report raised some interesting questions, and I certainly welcome it. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in expanding on the issues raised in the Government response in October, although on some issues they seemed not quite to have got the point that the Committee was making and they could go a little further in providing a way forward.