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Refuse Collection

I reiterate my congratulations to the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) and her Committee on two excellent reports on refuse collection. As a child of parents who lived through the second world war, I find an awful lot of the comments made on waste seriously familiar. All my life I have recycled; my pocket money used to be made up of returned penny deposits on bottles. In a sense, much of this is familiar in a personal way. However, as a reaction to the second world war, as we became richer we became more profligate with our waste. We are now trying to re-impose a regime of frugality in the midst of wealth, which is not the easiest thing to do. I therefore have enormous sympathy with local authorities, which have responsibility for waste collection and disposal, in trying to change what has become a fundamental aspect in people's psyche—as we got richer, it became an indicator of greater wealth that we could throw our waste away. The hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) is right: this may not be a pleasant topic, but it is fascinating because it is an industry in the midst of innovation. We see new thinking and new science being brought to bear on how to deal with our inevitable waste. From the 1960s onwards, being relatively young then, I remember being chastised by older people, who said, ““Why do the supermarkets pack everything in so many layers?”” or, ““Why can't we have loose biscuits?”” I had to tell them about health and safety and keeping the germs away from the tins of biscuits, and tell them that the packaging was necessary because people would buy the biscuits only if they looked pretty. Even then, they said, ““This is nonsense. We don't need all this packaging.”” There is a real and very human response to what is seen as wasteful. It is encouraging that the whole of society is now coming to recognise that waste is a problem that has to be dealt with, and dealt with intelligently.