17:22 Mary Creagh (Labour)

The Minister has been most generous in giving way to Members. She mentioned that the scheme will apply to plastic and metal drinks containers. What discussions has she had, or what information have her officials gathered, about the potential for manufacturers to switch their containers to glass and the impact that might have on use of resource and climate change?

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17:58 Barry Gardiner (Labour)

I commend the previous Government for much of the work they did. I commend the fact that they put in place the Environment Act 2021. I do so because it is really important that we adopt a bipartisan approach to these matters. When we are talking about the environment and climate change, yes in this Chamber we can have some political point scoring occasionally, but it is much more important that we create the bipartisan platform that means successive Governments can build and work from it.

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18:42 Mary Creagh (Labour)

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.

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