A week ahead of the Autumn Statement, a group of MPs has called on the Treasury to set out its future plans for landfill tax and how it plans to support investment in the waste and recycling sector.
The call today (November 16) from members of the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) comes following a year-long inquiry into the treasury’s role in relation to the environment. The committee is a cross-party group of MPs that holds the government to account on environmental issues.
MPs are calling for the Treasury to take a more long-term approach
In reference to waste, the committee found that landfill tax has played an important role in diverting waste from landfill but that it was “not adequate” to drive further increases in recycling rates, which are currently stalling.
And, it accused the Treasury of not working with Defra, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, to find new ways of boosting recycling to achieve the EU target of 50% recycling by 2020.
The call from the EAC, which is chaired by Labour MP Mary Creagh, comes following heavy lobbying by some sectors of the waste industry.
Calling for action, the inquiry report concludes: “The Treasury should set out in its response to this report its future plans for the landfill tax and how it plans to support further investment in the waste and recycling sectors in the future.”
Evidence
During the inquiry, the committee heard evidence from waste companies including Veolia and Viridor.
Dan Cooke, external affairs director at Viridor and chair of the communications committee at CIWM, suggested that one unintended result of the landfill tax was that waste was being increasingly shipped abroad, with the UK effectively “paying other countries to create jobs, investment and their own energy, when we could do that ourselves.”
Commenting on this, the committee said: “This raised questions about the extent to which the Treasury was concerned with supporting wider environmental goals and targets outside of the tax.”
The inquiry also considered evidence from the National Audit Office (NAO), which looked at whether the government was meeting its recycling targets and whether its 2010 decision to withdraw provisional PFI credits from seven out of 18 waste projects was impacting on this.
The NAO concluded that the decision was rational and that the UK was still likely to meet its targets, but the committee stressed that “the main reason the government would meet its target was because there was predicted to be roughly 6 million tonnes less waste in the system per year than expected”.
Sustainability
Announcing the committee’s findings, Mrs Creagh said: “The Treasury is highly influential and uniquely placed to ensure the whole of Government works to promote sustainability. But we have seen considerable evidence that it fails to do this. The Treasury tends not to take full account of the long term environmental costs and benefits of decisions which would reduce costs for taxpayers and consumers in the long run.”
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Source: letsrecycle.com Waste Managment
