Contribution
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, and to thank the Minister for his introduction. I broadly welcome this statutory instrument, which is at least a baby step towards polluter pays—that those who profit from the production of packaging that causes such damage in our communities should at least deal with the costs of dealing with the waste, which is of course only one small part of the total environmental and public health costs of the packaging overall.
I will start with a couple of specific questions, following on from the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, and then ask a broader, bigger question. As the noble Baroness said, a lot of the concern around this SI has been about the trade-off between closed-loop recycling systems, turning things back into food-grade recyclate, and how that will be monitored and audited. I note that a joint submission from the Wildlife and Countryside Link, the Environmental Investigation Agency and Everyday Plastic expressed concern about this and said that there was an absence of stringent and auditable evidence requirements, which could be a serious loophole.
We have to look at this in the context of how much sheer corruption and fraud we have in the waste sector. I can see one noble Lord frowning at me in puzzlement, but of course there is the 10,000-tonne waste mountain beside the River Cherwell in Kidlington in Oxfordshire and the 25,000-tonne one in Bickershaw in Wigan, which are believed to be illegally dumped waste. There are widely thought to be huge problems of lack of control and oversight.
In that context, I note the concerns expressed by our Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee about the resources available to the Environment Agency in England. It also refers to the other agencies, but I will refer just to England as that is within our purview. I note that the committee suggests that we press the Minister on whether Defra is confident that the regulators will have sufficient information—and, I would add, whether they will have the resources to process and deal with that information. We all know how incredibly stretched the Environment Agency is. Is it actually being given more resources to deal with this SI? That is my very specific question.
I have another specific question. I spoke about the corruption in the UK waste management sector, but significant quantities, particularly of plastics, have been shipped overseas. They are not being recycled at all and are causing huge environmental and public health issues, often in global South countries. So my specific question is: will companies be able to use a closed-loop recycling system that operates overseas, and how do the Government expect the Environment Agency in England in particular to manage that overseas information?
I turn to my second set of questions—it is one big question, really. The Minister said in his introduction that this was a once-in-a-generation action. I really hope that that is not true because, as I said, this deals only with the producers paying for the disposal of the waste. It does not cover all the environmental, social and public health damage done by the creation of that waste in the first place: by the resource extraction, the use of energy and climate emissions.
I am not sure whether the Minister is aware of a WWF UK report from 2021, Packaging Unwrapped, which spells out in great detail the different forms of packaging and what we know—and, importantly, do not know—about the damage they do. Looking at aluminium and steel, it talks about the lack of data on the damage done by mining and the energy use in their production, very often of course in the global South. On paper packaging, it talks about how much paper is imported from Indonesia and the potential, though little-documented or undocumented, links to deforestation there.
Right along the line, there are public health issues with the many thousands of chemicals added to plastics, all of which have public health implications. I hope the Minister will acknowledge that none of that is included if you just make companies pay for the waste disposal. Are the Government looking at further ways to make sure that the genuine full cost of the packaging is indeed paid by those who are profiting from its use?