Greater London Authority Bill

I shall speak to the new clauses, new schedules and amendments in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) and myself. There are some striking inconsistencies in the Government’s position. On the one hand, they tell us that everything is all right, and that in London and the rest of the country things are ticking along nicely. Landfill targets and recycling are a challenge, but no real change is needed in London or anywhere else. On the other hand, they acknowledge that London is not doing as well as it should, and that short, medium and longer-term landfill targets are a real challenge to the current system. Consequently, London needs a strong regional approach through the Mayor. We are told that London boroughs and London as a whole need to improve their performance, stop talking and put strategic solutions in place to meet landfill and recycling targets. But we are told that the best way to achieve that is to sit around a table as part of a voluntary forum, drink coffee, eat biscuits and set London’s waste problems to rights by talking about them. The Government argue that the Mayor’s proposals for a single waste disposal authority are bad because they split responsibility for collection and disposal. Those things, the Government say, need to be done at the same level. Either the Mayor does it all, or not at all. Although the Government say that these things are best done at local level, their own wider proposals for the rest of the country for joint working among local authorities on waste are about consolidating upwards from district to county level, not downwards to the districts. The Secretary of State will make statutory boards where districts request that. As things stand, waste management in London is a tangled mess of waste organisations and responsibilities. We have four statutory joint waste disposal authorities, 33 waste collection authorities, 33 waste planning authorities, 12 unitary waste authorities and, of course, the GLA itself. London already has a wide range of forums, organisations and networks for waste that operate across the capital, such as London Waste Action, the London waste strategic advisory group, the London cleansing officers group, the London recycling officers group, directors of the environment network, the regional technical advisory body for waste, and the London technical officers group. For fear of making it sound like a Friday, I will not read them all out, but I believe that there are another 10 or a dozen more. That arrangement is purely a function of historical accident rather than design. It represents the fragmentation of waste management following the abolition of the strategic government of London—the Greater London council—more than 20 years ago and the opportunities that have been missed since then to put things right. Faced with this unstructured confusion, the Government now propose yet another forum to bring together waste stakeholders in the capital. Waste in London has too much governance and not enough government. The Government’s response to the considerable waste charges that my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North highlighted is more talk but no more action. What about the boroughs’ existing and anticipated performance on waste recycling? Perhaps the structural and organisational absurdities could be tolerated if this laissez-faire approach worked, but the evidence proves the opposite. The capital did not meet its modest 25 per cent. target for household recycling in 2005-06. Worse still, it was the poorest performing region in the country—two thirds of its authorities are on the lowest quartile for recycling waste products from households. When all the waste collected by local authorities in the capital is included, London recycles a mere 9 per cent. compared with 30 per cent. for the country as a whole. The Government concede that London’s recycling performance is poor. They say that as the proposed single waste disposal authority would not also run collection, it would have no impact on altering that performance. Such an authority is necessary, however, because it would be able to direct authorities to deliver materials to it in a specific way. Through the way in which it charged for its services, it could create real incentives for maximum recycling. Through the type of recycling and composting facilities that it built, it would create more opportunities for increased recycling and service consistency across the capital. On progress towards meeting landfill targets, London once again leaves a lot to be desired. An Office of Government Commerce report in 2005 showed that the London region had the second lowest number of planned facilities programmed to be built over the next 15 years. London is planning to build 11 new facilities over the next few years, but has nothing planned beyond 2011. That can be compared with the 308 additional facilities required by the statutory London plan to meet the capital’s self-sufficiency targets for 2020.