Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) (Amendment No. 2) Regulations 2008

First, I shall answer one of the latter questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, which was also implied in what the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said. In effect, I admitted in my opening speech—although it was not in my text—that there had initially been an element of gold-plating in the regulations. We are now bringing our regulations more directly in line with the wording of the directive. That is the point about paragraph 7.5. I asked colleagues, ““By the way, if these were done in 2007””—when I was at Defra—““did I put them through?””. Apparently that was consolidation and they went through in 2005, so I plead not guilty. I also suspect that I would not have spotted it anyway, but I tend to ask about over-regulation and gold-plating. By bringing our regulations more into line with the directive, we are giving flexibility to the Environment Agency. We are not cutting corners; we are taking out what could have been classed as gold-plating. With regard to the actual metals, it is true that the overall figures are a success. The directive target for the UK, which we have to meet by 31 December this year, sets a minimum of 60 per cent recovery of all packaging waste and a minimum of 55 per cent recycling. The breakdown of that is 60 per cent for glass, 60 per cent for paper and board and 50 per cent for metals. We cannot achieve that without export; that is part of the issue before us. The target for plastics is 22.5 per cent, quite a precise figure, while for wood it is 15 per cent. The UK has an overall business target of 72 per cent recovery of packaging waste in 2008, of which 92 per cent must be recycling. The noble Lord is also quite right about the cost of some of this. One probably would not get the metal dumped; it is only the people dealing with metal recycling who have made the point to us that there is a difficulty. I have the figures here, but I cannot find them. Aluminium is running at about £1,000 a tonne and steel at £200 a tonne, so quite a lot of money is involved. The energy saved by recycling aluminium is enormous and apparently you can continue to recycle it; it can be recycled an infinite number of times, as I deployed in answer to questions in the House. With regard to where material is exported to, I am pleased to see that at least one of the places is in Europe: Germany, China, India, Thailand and Malaysia are the areas. These exports are regulated by the Environment Agency, which operates in a sense like a local authority by going out to check the environmental conditions. Metal would not be dumped anyway—it is too expensive, and one can get one’s money back. Where other waste is concerned, there are checks and balances to ensure that there is no dumping. Waste going abroad for dumping is illegal. That is crystal clear. Here we are dealing essentially with metal. The noble Lord asked about what he heard on the news this morning. I regret to say that that is nothing new. I myself have noticed reports over the past two or three years about church roofs and other areas being affected by what I describe as spivs and malcontents. The idea that they are taking out the copper wires of railway signalling systems is just appalling, and it is right that there is a complete clampdown on that. But the fact is that the stolen metal is being exported; it is not for dumping. That is the point. We need to be able to meet the targets we have been given and that we have accepted. That is the issue here. The Environment Agency is involved in that. It has to be satisfied. The wording in paragraph 7.5, as the noble Lord picked out, is more akin to what is in the original European directive. We have taken out the bit that we found to be impractical. It was shown in the further evidence note of the Explanatory Memorandum that the cost to industry of producing the paperwork and tracing compared to the cost and the value of the business with regard to metal was so tiny that it would be difficult to achieve it. If we can give the Environment Agency a bit more discretion and it sticks within the rules of the directive, everyone is a winner. The Government—indeed, all of us—want what is exported within the rules to count against our target. Some of the metal is exported and not set against our target because it is too difficult for the end user to organise the paperwork and the certificates. If we can get that into line, what is exported will be counted against the directive and we will be less likely to suffer infraction proceedings. That is the whole point of the exercise.