B

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 15 July 2025

Debate

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (Amendment, etc.) Regulations 2025

Contribution

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I thank the Minister for her introduction. I have a few specific questions, particularly relating to online marketplaces. We can probably all come up with a list of half a dozen large websites that we would expect to be selling these products, but I have a little awareness—possibly more than most Members of your Lordships House, but still not that great—of things such as Discord servers, which are not very visible or open to the public but require membership. A lot of selling, particularly to young people, may take place through these layers of the internet, which be at the top layer of the TikToks and eBays and so on. How will the Government ensure that we are not going to see the cheapest products ending up further and further down the chain of legibility to government and regulators. I would be interested in understanding a bit more about how the Government will enforce these regulations. How they will find the sellers and work out who owns them and who owns the websites? What level of enforcement is going to happen? I take this opportunity to pay testimony to the work of Action on Smoking and Health. At an ASH event that I attended downstairs a week or so back, they had a disposable vape and a reusable vape, and the trick question was: which was which? They were indistinguishable. I also note recent reports that many shops that used to sell disposable vapes are now selling reusable ones, but the same shops do not sell refills. Such shops are just taking things called reusable vapes and still treating them as disposable vapes. If the Minister is unable to answer that now, I will understand if she wants to write to me. When we are talking about managing the waste problem, although there is a sense that we have dealt with the problem of single-use vapes because we have passed a law, I would question that. From what I have seen and has been said to me, how much have we changed the reality on the ground? My other question comes from practical experience. Last week, I happened to be in the middle of Dudley town centre where I saw what is perhaps a measure of the socioeconomic usage of vaping. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, referred to the fact that vaping was supposed to be for people giving up cigarettes; the last statistic that I saw suggests that there are 1 million people in the UK who vape who have never smoked tobacco. In the middle of Dudley town centre, the borough council had provided a specific bin for the disposal of vapes. My question to the Minister, therefore, follows on from the probably fairly modest extra revenue that these regulations will raise. How will we ensure that the funds raised actually go to the people incurring the costs? I am thinking of the financial impact on councils in particular—I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association—but also any other bodies that may be forced to deal with the disposal of what may or may not be single-use or reusable vapes.

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