The Department, it is understood, had been hoping that the Climate Change Bill make swifter progress through Parliament than its current pace which could mean the Bill does not become law until later in the year.
As a consequence councils may have to commit themselves to running the trials before they know the full legislative implications. One of the reasons for this is that council budgets start to be set from October and so the incentive trials will need to be costed and planned.
The pressure within Defra to make sure the trials go ahead comes in the wake of an assessment of the incentives schemes. And, yesterday Judicaelle Hammond, head of producer responsibility at Defra, also pointed to how incentives could be used to encourage plastics recycling indicating that they may not just be weight-based..
Assessment
In its financial assessment of incentives, the Deaprtment explained some of the thinking behind incentives. It said: “The UK needs to radically reduce the amount of waste it sends to landfill, to reduce the climate change impact of our production and consumption and to comply with the EU Landfill Directive. Encouraging householders to minimise, compost and recycle their waste as far as possible is an important part of this.”
Defra continued: “The UK is currently the only EU15 country to prohibit local authorities from placing financial incentives upon householders to minimise and recycle waste. Government wishes to provide a power to pilot local authority incentives for household waste minimisation and recycling.”
Commenting on the policy objectives, the Department said that it is aiming for a power to pilot local authority incentives for household waste minimisation and recycling. And, it added that a number of other options are already available to authorities to encourage recycling and waste minimisation by households. These include reward schemes, compulsory recycling and Alternate Weekly Collection.
Misaligned
Speaking at a Recoup conference in London yesterday on “Recovering more plastic packaging”, Ms Hammond said that “Incentives seem to be misaligned across the chain. If they are not aligned then we have to make sure government intervention doesn't make it worse.”
She explained that the government recognised that weight-based targets were not helping to encourage the recycling of lighter-weight materials such as plastics.
She said: “It is well recognised that there is a problem in government targets, they have been weight based and light volumes can be expensive to collect. But, the methodological framework for prioritising materials according to life cycle analysis has not yet been fixed.”
Reward
And, Ms Hammond went on to comment on how financial incentives will work and suggested that they will help encourage plastic recycling: “With financial incentives, local authorities will be able to charge people for what they don't recycle but reward them for recycling. This could potentially have an impact.”
Local authority representatives present felt that this meant that the financial incentives system will not simply be weight-based.
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