Luke Taylor

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) on securing this debate. Waste management is a huge issue, which requires the attention of us all in this House. We Liberal Democrats are committed to strengthening incentives to reduce waste and our country’s reliance on incinerators. Although incineration of residual waste might be the least bad option available at the moment to handle our unrecycled and unseparated waste, it is far from the long-term solution that we need. Let us be absolutely clear: incinerators are currently an unavoidable solution for many local councils. They are a deeply imperfect solution to a much bigger problem, though. When we get to the point where all of our commercial and domestic waste is avoided, reduced, reused, recycled and composted with no residual waste remaining, I will be at the front of the march to shut down our energy-from-waste facilities, for they will have served their purpose. As several Members have correctly observed, incineration sits at the very bottom of the waste hierarchy. The energy that incinerators produce for local heat networks will ideally have been switched to air source and ground source heat pumps or perhaps waste heat from server farms, leaving these towering structures finally silent, but we are a long way from that point. Today, well-managed and well-maintained incinerators are an effective and safe method for disposing of our residual waste.