Mary Creagh

I am going to finish my points, and if there is time at the end, I will take interventions. We are very short of time. Turning to material switching, a 2023 report from Reloop and the Container Recycling Institute considered numerous international examples of introductions and expansions of a DRS, and concluded that there was no evidence of this causing an observed decline in sales of in-scope products. On small retailers, we have engaged with retail—as I said earlier—and we can confirm that retail premises under 100 square metres in an urban area will be automatically exempt from the DRS retailer obligations, which will support some of the smallest retailers. Although those retailers larger than 100 square metres will be required to host a return point, they will be able to determine whether a manual return point or a small reverse vending machine would be best for their store style, with support from the DMO. Evidence from other areas that have introduced these schemes shows that some very small retailers enjoy hosting returns and are keen to experience the additional footfall they bring. On local authorities, there will be new burdens funding for trading standards, and the DRS will collect at least 90% of containers by year 3. This will have a varying impact on local authorities: they will miss out on the sales of materials, but will make savings of around £30 million from having to collect less litter, so I think we will see a positive impact there. On incinerators, the residual waste capacity note that we published on 30 December shows that there are certain areas in England where significant volumes of household waste are still sent to landfill, and we landfill far too much non-household waste. Disposing of waste in landfill has a greater negative environmental impact than recovering energy through incineration, but this does not take away from our commitment to minimise residual waste. The new conditions we have set out will support economic growth and will drive our push to net zero and our plan for change. Turning to interoperability in Northern Ireland, the scheme will of course be interoperable across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but although there is a separate scheme in the Republic of Ireland—