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Refuse Collection

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is a combination of things. Around half of fly-tips contain material from households, and that material is often collected by people such as she describes. What we would say is that the householder has a duty to be sure that those who pick up their waste intend to dispose of it appropriately and not fly-tip it. We all have a duty to be careful about who we give our waste to. If we are being offered something that clearly looks very different from the regular collection services, for which in the case of bulky items one may today have to pay the council, we ought to be aware that it is probably going to be fly-tipped. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The relationship between the potential for fly-tipping and waste incentive schemes is in no way proven. The other thing that I have just been notified of by my officials is that apparently—I should know this—all of the responses to the consultation on the waste incentive schemes were published on our website and so they did not require an FOI request. Therefore, this will remain a bit of a mystery. I have some more questions to which I want to respond. I think that I have dealt with all of them, but I have been provided with some additional information about anaerobic digestion. For the benefit of hon. Members, I will just say that there are already three AD plants in England that are treating source-separated waste at the present time. Six are being built and the electricity generated by AD—this is a very important point—is eligible for renewables obligation support. That is a particularly important new development, and banding is one of the ways in which the Government are incentivising the whole concept of the development of anaerobic digestion. I hope that I have managed to tackle most of the points that have been raised today. Apart from the one point on which I have undertaken to write, I will be delighted to write to hon. Members if there is anything else that we spot from the debate record. In her opening remarks today, my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West, the Chairman of the Committee, referred to our waste strategy 2007. She referred to its hierarchy, which we all now know so well, and to how we should reduce, reuse, recycle and recover before we think of ever disposing entirely of the waste and losing those very precious resources. My hon. Friend also spoke about the various levers that the Government have already put in place. Of course, these are much wider issues that are outside the ambit of our debate today. However, I would just like to assure hon. Members that the Government take waste and our waste strategy very seriously indeed and waste is a real priority for DEFRA. We face a great challenge; it is a historic one. Earlier, I referred to our use of landfill and the fact that it was so cheap to dispose of waste in that way. We all have a responsibility to meet that challenge, both in our personal lives, in the way we dispose of our own waste, and in the way we support our local authorities. At the end of the day, local authorities are the vehicle through which most of us will see our waste disposed and we owe it to them to have a sensible debate, to understand what the issues are, what the incentives might be and what the penalties might be, if we as citizens do not behave in an appropriate way, given the need to meet this challenge. I look forward to continuing our dialogue on all of these subjects, as I am sure we will, in further debates and in further discussions with the Select Committee. Again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West for her presentation today and I thank other hon. Members for their involvement in these debates. I will just end by saying that I am sure that, whatever differences we might have in our thinking on the appropriate strategies, we all remain committed to proper, environmentally responsible collection and disposal of waste. Question put and agreed to.