Hilary Benn, secretary of state for the environment, yesterday spoke of the need to provide incentives to encourage householders to recycle more of their waste.
He was speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth, as it was revealed that measures to give local authorities the power to offer household waste recycling incentives might be included within the forthcoming Climate Change Bill.
Any system must be revenue-neutral but provide real incentives to recycling.
Hilary Benn
Mr Benn said at a question-and-answer session in the main Conference hall that any system “must be revenue neutral”, with other parts of government understood to be concerned that recycling incentives could be viewed as an extra tax.
Responding to a question about what his government was doing about the amount of packaging waste arising in household bins, Mr Benn said: “We are doing a lot but we need to do more. We are working with the packaging industry and there is the Directive – it is about first reducing the amount of waste and then putting more into recycling.
“We have quadrupled the rates of recycling in the last 10 years but we do need to do more and that is why we have set local authorities with tough targets over the next few years. We are now looking at providing incentives to encourage householders to do more – we have been consulting on this after requests from local authorities, but any system must be revenue-neutral but provide real incentives to recycling.”
In his main speech to the Labour Party Conference, the secretary of state spoke mostly about the dangers of climate change, having visited the UN in New York on Monday for preliminary discussions ahead of a possible meeting in December to look into a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
He mentioned the extreme weather seen over the summer, and hailed the Climate Change Bill as making Britain the first country in the world to set carbon emissions targets into law. One of the first indicators of environmental success for his government, he said, would be that within three years “we will be recycling 40% of our waste”.
Incentives
Afterwards, the secretary of state spoke to letsrecycle.com to point out that the local authority incentives scheme for recycling was still out to consultation, but that his view was that: “Within a revenue neutral framework local authorities should be able to provide an incentive for recycling.”
He explained: “There are different ways of doing it, but in the end it will be up to the local authorities to make the decisions about what they are going to do. We've got to do more, but we've got clear targets to do that.”
Joan Ruddock, minister responsible for recycling and waste issues, is leading the work on incentives for recycling, and revealed to letsrecycle.com just after the Conference came to a close: “There is every expectation that we will be able to release something on recycling incentives within the Climate Change Bill.”
The minister, who was keen to stress that there is still a “great deal of consulting going on”, said that any form of incentives would require councils running them to have sound recycling systems in place. She also emphasised the importance of ensuring that systems are tailored to the different parts of society and types of household.
She said: “It's obvious that if we decide to go for incentives that we will need to see local authorities adopting the very best practice in recycling – they will need in place very good recycling schemes.
“We have no doubt that local authorities, who have called for such a scheme, will have to have a really good look at how appropriate it will be in different sectors of their authority areas. If we have multi-occupancy homes then it is more difficult than if they have homes with lots of space for wheelie bins,” Mrs Ruddock explained.
In the Question and Answer session ahead of his main speech, the secretary of state for environment was asked by Labour Party members about the importance of business recycling, and how to get businesses to “take seriously the recycling agenda, just like residents take seriously the recycling challenge”.
Mr Benn said in reply: “Everyone needs to get the message – some business have got it, some haven't. Whether it is business waste or residential waste we cannot go on this way.”
Register for free to comment