Mary Creagh

I will give time at the end but I want to make some progress. The annual growth rate of circular industries is 3%, more than double the UK’s overall growth rate of 1.2%. Extended producer responsibility for packaging—pEPR—moves recycling costs from taxpayers to packaging producers. Think about it: not everybody drinks and not everybody shops online, but we are all paying for the costs of collection. We have had a great tour of drinking places, hostelries and amazing producers, but at the moment everybody in the country is paying for that, through council tax and general taxation. These reforms are creating systematic change, and that is hard. Simpler recycling in England will make recycling easier and consistent. People will be able to recycle the same materials, including glass, whether they are at home, work or school, which will create a step change in the quality and quantity of recyclate streams. That is enabled by pEPR, which will pay for the new costs associated with the change, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) mentioned. We are also introducing deposit return schemes in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland that add refundable deposits to single-use plastic, steel and aluminium containers. I discussed this with my colleague in Northern Ireland last week at the British-Irish Council environment ministerial meeting at Kew Gardens. We had a two-hour debate about how we would co-operate on the circular economy, in particular looking at the challenges of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man—island economies with no real reprocessing facilities—and what we can all learn from each other.