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Refuse Collection

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention. At some point, I was going to congratulate the Government—which, as she knows, is rare—on responding to the pressure for proper cooking to be taught in schools, because that is how we will fundamentally reduce the amount of food waste. There was a time when people had roast on Sunday, cold on Monday, shepherd's pie on Tuesday, sandwiches on Wednesday, soup on Thursday and fish on Friday. Where is the waste in that? We should all start to apply that mental regime, as it is common-sense management of the family larder—I will sound like Mrs. Thatcher soon. There does not have to be food waste, although I am grateful to have food waste for my garden because I compost it. That is enough home-grown philosophy. If we can move our society much more in that general direction, we will be able to deal with an awful lot of issues concerning waste in general and food waste in particular without having to put in place enormously expensive recycling and disposal systems. I am feeling slightly schizophrenic. Long before I became a Member of Parliament, my constituency had a weekly recycling collection. All waste is collected once a week and is divided into non-recyclables, bottles, plastic and cans, and paper. That has been happening in the borough of Bromley for more than 10 years, and it has worked very effectively. As a London borough, Bromley has long been at the forefront of recycling. I also live in Rye, as my husband is leader of East Sussex county council, which has just introduced alternate weekly collection. If there is one problem that I have on a Sunday night, it is remembering what is being collected that week. I am sure that I am not alone in that. I am conscious that, because this is a new system, it has taken a long time for people to adjust, although I give credit to the local council for providing first-class publicity and information. People knew what was happening, what they had to do and how they were going to do it, and the boxes were broadly delivered in good time. The fact that the new vans were the wrong size and could not get down the lanes in rural areas was a management problem for the company that took the job on, and it had nothing to do with the publicity programme of the local council, which I thought was first class, even though I looked at it with a critical eye. However, the information that we extracted from DEFRA, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, on the responses to its consultation shows that many issues have emerged in relation to the knock-on effects of the complexity of AWC. Whether people have a fortnightly or a weekly collection, evidence is emerging that there is a big increase in fly-tipping. We are very lucky that last summer was cool. We cannot use last summer as an indication that there is unlikely to be greater infestation by animals. In cooler weather, the attraction of food smells is less than in a hot summer. Some years ago, during a hot summer, I remember carefully wrapping up some prawn shells, which even I cannot recycle or cook with. When I got home a week later, the shells were a mass of maggots. I knew what I had to do; I did it and it did not work. We have not had a hot summer. I hope that we have a hot summer, but people who live in the country will be hoping and praying that we do not. In terms of infestation, it is unproven that a weekly food collection will not cause health problems. The other factor that irritates so much is the sheer volume of food that goes into plastic containers, which has been mentioned. Few of those containers are recyclable. I am sure that every Member in this Chamber looks for the number on the bottom of such containers. If they can spot it, often it is not 1, 2 or 3. That is grating for everybody. We must do more work with the supermarkets, which are the prime users of plastic containers, and the packaging industry to ensure that we have many more recyclable containers. What concerns me more than anything is ensuring that council tax payers do not have to be charged further for the collection of waste. I heard this morning that, on average, band D council tax will be about £1,400, which is an enormous increase in what local people have to pay. We are already on the cusp of a council tax payers' revolt and people do not want to have to pay even more for their waste collection, which many people regard as about the only service that they get from their local council. We should ignore that fact that people have access to social services, because many people do not use them. If people do not have children, they feel that they are not using the education service. In many cases, the only thing that people think that they pay council tax for is waste collection. I sympathise with the views expressed in the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph: if people feel that they will have to pay more tax because of waste collection, there will be a revolt. The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail do not run articles that do not chime with their readership. If they believe that their readership is not interested in the issue of extra taxation, they will not run articles about it. Yes, that is a circular, chicken-and-egg argument, but we cannot blame those two newspapers for highlighting the bin taxes. They would not do so if they did not believe that their readers were very likely to revolt against any form of bin taxation.