HC Deb 29 June 1988 vol 136 cc499-506

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Peter Lloyd.]

1.10 am
Mr. Chris Butler (Warrington, South)

I have had an opportunity to speak to my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment and I understand that he is not averse to the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Taylor) contributing briefly to the debate if he manages to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, after my contribution.

It is my duty tonight to report a sense of utter outrage that is felt in the north-west at the proposal of the Manchester Ship Canal Company to import 7.5 million tonnes of supposed American domestic waste into my constituency. The resultant mountain of muck will dominate the flat Cheshire landscape. It will rise to 130 ft and cover 390 acres. Thousands of representations are pouring into me. I cannot over-emphasise the sense of bitterness and amazement among my constituents and among others in the north-west that the proposal should even be contemplated.

I have experienced this urgency of public opinion only once before, and that was when I was working in No. 10 during the Falklands crisis. On the Beaufort scale of political force, I reckon that if unassuaged these winds could destroy careers, even those of Ministers.

For the past 18 months there have been barges trawling around the Caribbean filled with sewage, one from New York and one from Philadelphia. They have been trying vainly to find a home. The Manchester Ship Canal Company is suggesting that the poor and under-developed nations of the Caribbean should reject the barges and that it will accept and welcome them for profit. This will be a national issue and the British people will reject the proposition and its defenders.

In 1986, Cheshire county council, against bitter opposition from my predecessor and the hon. Member for Warrington, North (Mr. Hoyle), gave planning permission to the Manchester Ship Canal Company to place a tip on Arpley meadows. It was meant to be a strategic long-term facility to take Cheshire's waste for the next 25 years. The council was not disinterested because it agreed to share the profits of the deal. Critically, it entered into a local agreement to encourage the import of waste from outside Cheshire.

The Manchester Ship Canal Company has interpreted the agreement widely and has entered into a preliminary deal with Tower Water and Waste Ltd. to import 1.5 million tonnes of American domestic waste for five years. A company search of Power Water and Waste Ltd. shows that it has the princely sum of paid-up capital of £2. It has filed no accounts since the company was formed on 23 September 1986. The company will import—I say this so that my hon. Friend the Minister will understand the nature of the beast with which we are dealing—the muck into Liverpool and then ship it every day in 300 22-tonne lorries into the heart of my constituency, through the over-stretched road system around Warrington.

Why should Ministers be involved? First, it is a question of national importance as to whether we ought to be shipping in large imports of foreign waste. I wonder what areas of the country will be the next to be blighted by a megatonnage of muck. This is the thin end of a potentially enormous wedge. I wonder whether Cirencester, or even Tewkesbury, might be blighted by such imports.

Secondly, although one might think that the waste disposal authority itself would be the prime mover in stopping such imports, it may not be able to do so because it is over a legal barrel, due to the foolish agreement into which it entered, to encourage imports of outside waste.

The Royal Commission on environmental pollution, in its eleventh report, concluded that landfill capacity in the United Kingdom is a scarce resource that needs to be conserved. However, these proposals will reduce the life of the tip at Arpley meadows by 15 years. Cheshire, already hard pressed to find landfill sites, will discover that its entire strategic waste disposal policy is jeopardised. Worse, the Manchester Ship Canal Company plans to find another landfill site in Cheshire at the end of the five-year period with a view to importing even more American domestic waste.

I am told by the man in the street—and he is right—that the American continent is a vast land mass and that ours is a small country hard pressed by environmental problems. Why cannot the American nation find a place in its vast land mass—perhaps in its deserts—to dispose of its waste and not add to our problems? It is paradoxical that the Government are spending £4 billion on clearing the Mersey basin but at the same time we appear to be allowing a towering beacon of noxiousness right on the Mersey's banks.

The royal commission suggested that the costs of preventing pollution should fall on the producers. I should like my hon. Friend to say whether the Government accept that recommendation, and, if so, how it could be enforced on the municipalities of New York, Philadelphia and Boston. The royal commission commented: The greater the degree of separation between the final disposal of waste and the original process which gave rise to it, the more likely it is that the incidence of costs will be distorted. My fear is that Warrington will end up paying the bills of New York.

The royal commission commented that there is often uncertainty surrounding the composition of a waste. That must be especially so with a megatonnage of waste from the United States. I find it hard to believe that there will be a man with a pan sorting through 7.5 million tonnes of waste before it comes over here or when it arrives. The suggestion that there is one global environment and that US waste is exactly the same as United Kingdom waste is laughable. The United States has a different climate, different insects, different diseases and different rubbish—and different ways of dealing with that rubbish and those diseases.

I ask hon. Members to pay heed to the words of Mrs. Linda Haslock, who lives 35 miles south of New York. She writes: Non biodegradable plastic waste amounts to 112.8 tons of garbage each day for New York alone—never mind Boston and Philadelphia. It would pay, for once, to have a political jamboree for all those Cheshire officials to come out to Staten Island and spend a day or so surveying the current New York dump at Arthurs Kill and Fresh Kill. The mess is indescribable and the stench detectable up to 5 miles away when the wind is in the wrong direction. Park that lot in Warrington and you have the equivalent of a National Disaster area for years. To say nothing of the inevitable unkillable New York variety of cockroaches which will come with it all and proceed to infest the whole country at a phenomenal rate. Incidentally, the Staten Island Dump is largely responsible for the pollution of the New Jersey Coast. Three days ago a large consignment of used and filthy 'crack' phials and hypodermic needles washed up on the beach … drug dealers' junk.

There are real environmental risks in the proposals. Who would pick up the bill if the Colorado beetle infested the Cheshire potato crop and destroyed it? Last year we suffered swine fever in this country as a result of imported meat products. There is a danger that small rabid animals would be imported and would infect the native livestock. Who would be responsible if thousands of domestic animals had to be slaughtered within a given radius?

The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food knows what horrors are contained in the proposals. It has been in correspondence with Humberside about the proposals by a shipping agent to bring in 15,000 tonnes from Holland. The ENDS report of May 1988 stated: According to MAFF's veterinary branch, any foreign household waste is likely to contain animal products and as such would be subject to licensing under the Importation of Animal Products and Poultry Products Order 1980. `No such licence would be given due to the animal health risks involved', MAFF says. 'Animal viruses are likely to persist in imported refuse, and could be taken up by seagulls, rats and other animals from British landfills', added a MAFF spokesman.

Even Chris Bonnington now faces a £400 fine for bringing in the supposed skull of an abominable snowman. MAFF even mounted a raid to seize the skin of a wild blue sheep that he had brought in. I urge my hon. Friend to dispense with this strange reticence about the 7.5 million tonnes that it is proposed to bring into the country, and to end this sorry saga now.

I realise that money is involved in the deal, but it is dirty money. The British people will be looking for more than the scalp of a yeti if the United Kingdom becomes the dustbin of the world but for paying dollars at the turnstile.

1.21 am
Mr. Matthew Taylor (Truro)

I thank the hon. Member for Warrington, South (Mr. Butler) for allowing me to speak. As he knows, we not only have great sympathy with Warrington but are concerned about the potential for our waterways to inflict a similar scheme on us in Cornwall.

As the hon. Gentleman rightly made clear, waste is now becoming an international problem, with a phenomenal 183,000 tonnes imported to Britain in 1986–87, compared to only 5,000 in the early 1980s. The short-term answer to that international problem has been to pay Third-world countries and the poorer communities—including our own—to accept toxic waste that should be, indeed is, refused by all who are able to do so. While Warrington and Cornwall cannot be compared to Third-world countries, we are told that we should accept waste-dumping schemes because they will improve the job situation in two areas that continue to suffer terrible unemployment, and therefore, in effect, are believed to have their backs against the wall.

When the CEGB threatened to build a nuclear power station in Cornwall, I was among many thousands who protested. We argued that what was not safe for Plymouth or London was not safe for Cornwall either. Exactly the same is true with this proposal. What is not welcome in New York or Washington is certainly not welcome in Cornwall or Warrington. The Minister must respond to our opposition in Cornwall to the dumping of American domestic waste because of fears of toxicity and the new fear of the spread of diseases to local livestock.

The third report of the hazardous waste inspectorate has already expressed fears of transportation of diseases by seagulls and rats in those waste dumps. We all saw not so long ago the farce of New York's rubbish being transported to and fro on massive barges, not being accepted anywhere. The rubbish travelled up and down the east coast of America without takers. It had been claimed that the barges held only the domestic waste that is promised for this country, but it was found to contain toxic waste, and the Americans did not want it to be landed anywhere in the States.

Must we look forward in the not-too-distant future to barges travelling up and down the south coast of Cornwall with such toxic waste destined for some part of our country? The proposals will mean the importation of 2 million tonnes of waste a year through Falmouth harbour. That is equivalent to 10 per cent. of British domestic waste. The United States is phasing out landfill sites because it has had such bad experience of them.

The debate will not stop here tonight. Solutions will be found only through an inquiry to answer the fears of the hazardous waste inspectorate, the fears of the people of Warrington and the fears of the people of Cornwall. It is not enough for the applications to be turned down, because they will be back tomorrow, in Cornwall, in Warrington and in other parts of the country. The United States does not want the waste and it believes that it can offload it on to us. Neither in this country nor internationally has a solution been found to the growing problem of waste disposal.

Government commitment to a full public inquiry generating genuine public trust and support for real, long-term solutions will provide the answer, Meanwhile, the proposals for Warrington and Cornwall most certainly should not go ahead.

1.26 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Colin Moynihan)

First, I should like to address the general background to policy in regard to the handling of waste before moving on to the specific and important issues raised by the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. Taylor) and my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington, South (Mr. Butler).

I thank my hon. Friend for the opportunity to discuss the proposed import of waste from America and the wider issues of waste imports in general. I should like to put the debate in context.

As a general principle, it is right that waste should be disposed of as close to its point of origin as practicable to maximise the effectiveness of controls over its movement and disposal. However, it has been widely accepted that the trade in waste is legitimate and indeed beneficial where the waste is to be disposed of more safely than in its country of origin and where the import does not endanger the availability of disposal facilities for United Kingdom waste. We are all more aware of the international dimension of pollution and it is in the interests of international environmental protection that, where appropriate, wastes should travel to facilities which can deal with them to a higher environmental standard.

This general proposition has long been the Government's policy and was endorsed by the Lords Committee on Science and Technology as long ago as 1981 and again by the Royal Commission on environmental pollution in its 11th report, "Managing Waste, The Duty of Care", in 1985.

The import of waste has increased since these two eminent bodies reported. However, it must be seen in perspective. Trade in waste is much more widespread elsewhere. The OECD estimated that in 1983 2.2 million tonnes of wastes crossed the borders of the European Community, but in that year only 15,000 tonnes came to the United Kingdom. Reports suggest that trade in waste has risen both in the European Community and throughout the world.

The United Kingdom has taken a share of this growth but from a very low base level. We still, it seems, import rather less than many of our European neighbours and certainly less than might be expected in view of our size and trading record. It is still a very small proportion of the amount of waste we dispose of annually in the United Kingdom. Imports of special waste amounted to 3.5 per cent. of total special waste disposed of in 1986 and the non-special waste was about 0.3 per cent. of industrial waste arising in England and Wales.

Imports of special waste—that is, wastes which are dangerous or difficult to dispose of—have increased from 4,000 tonnes in 1981 to 52,000 tonnes in 1986. Those special wastes all go to the specialist facilities I mentioned earlier, providing feedstock for them which allows them to remain in business to provide this essential service for our own waste arisings. As long as the waste is disposed of safely here, the United Kingdom can be proud of its record in the international waste disposal scene and protection of the wider international environment. This trade in special waste meets the criteria set out by both the Science and Technology Committee and the RCEP and is a legitimate trade.

It is, of course, less easy to see any reasons for importing waste for direct landfill, since all countries landfill waste and therefore have the facilities to dispose of that waste themselves. In 1986, there were imports of around 130,000 tonnes of non-special waste for direct landfill. It was mainly contaminated soil, fly-ash, gypsum and other industrial waste from the Netherlands, which has severe problems with landfill in some areas because of its geology and high water table. The United Kingdom, along with France, West Germany, Belgium and several other countries assisted their neighbour in the disposal of some of the waste. In those circumstances, even import for direct landfill can be said to be in the best interests of the wider environment, provided of course that it is disposed of safely in the country which accepts it. I can confirm that this is the case in the United Kingdom.

Having set out the Government's general view of waste imports, I shall now consider the matter of particular concern to my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington, South and the hon. Member for Truro.

The proposal to ship 1.5 million to 2 million tonnes of domestic waste per annum from the eastern seaboard of the United States of America for disposal in this country is undoubtedly different in kind and in scale from the imports we have received so far. Safe disposal of waste, which is a prerequisite for all disposal of United Kingdom and foreign waste, must depend on full knowledge of the contents of the waste. Paradoxically, it is often easier to guarantee the contents of chemical wastes—acids do not have a different chemical make-up if they are Belgian as opposed to being British—but household refuse is quite a different matter.

In England and Wales, we have recently laid regulations which specify that certain items of household waste may not be put in a dustbin but should be kept separate to ensure their safe disposal. This applies particularly to clinical waste arising in the home. We have, as yet, no indication that such segregation applies to household waste collection in, for instance the United States of America.

There are differences, too, in the nature of the articles which may be found in household waste from other countries. The United Kingdom is fortunate in being free of many pests and diseases, particularly those affecting animals and plants, which are common in some other countries.

Household waste will contain a large proportion of food and garden waste, which must involve the risk of pests and diseases being carried with it. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food restricts the import of any animal products and poultry, of animal pathogens and of listed plants, plant pests, plant products or soils. Such import is normally prohibited unless the relevant authorities in the exporting country can certify that it is free of disease. These regulations would apply equally to waste animal products or plants. It is difficult to see how the United States authorities could certify free from disease the contents of the many hundreds of thousands of dustbins.

Finally, there are differences in scale between the trade in special waste at 52,000 tonnes per annum and household waste at 1.5 to 2 million tonnes per annum. While imports of special waste and the relatively small amount of non-special waste can be accommodated without diverting disposal resources away from United Kingdom needs, the import of up to 2 million tonnes of waste, even if it did not raise questions of public health and safety, would be a significant increase in the amount of waste to be disposed of in this country.

This proposal comes at a time when we are re-assessing the availability of void space for waste disposal and other valuable land uses such as recreation and nature reserves. We are also reconsidering current landfill practices in view of the increased number of incidents involving landfill gas. A reappraisal of the geological conditions necessary for safe landfill of putrescible wastes may well reduce the availability of void space in the future.

For all these reasons, the proposed import of household waste from the United States of America gives grave cause for concern. It is difficult to envisage how the waste can be guaranteed free from disease or pests and, even if it were, I believe that the United Kingdom would have considerable difficulty in accommodating the proposed volumes at a time of increasing uncertainty about the future use of certain types of geology for landfill.

My hon. Friend has argued that matters of this kind should not be left to local authorities. There may be a case to argue on that point, but the fact is that under existing legislation, waste disposal control and regulation rests clearly and firmly on waste disposal authorities. They, not central Government, have the powers and the duty to ensure not only that waste is disposed of safely in their areas but that facilities are available in the longer term. Thus, for the particular proposals concerning Cheshire, the county council, as waste disposal authority, is both operator of the site and regulation authority for the county, responsible for the planning of waste management in its area.

It seems quite clear that the proposal to increase the amount of household waste for disposal in the county by 300 to 400 per cent. would require a radical reappraisal of the operation of the site in question and the long-term waste planning of the area. It is for Cheshire, in the first instance, to consider the impact of the proposals on the site and on the plans, as it would be for any waste disposal authority considering any proposals which would radically alter its plans for individual sites or the area as a whole.

However, as my hon. Friend is aware, I am meeting a deputation from the council tomorrow to discuss the position and ascertain what conclusions it has reached. I believe that it will be an important and decisive meeting, not least in providing me with a comprehensive update on its position and to gain replies to a number of the additional specific points which the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend have brought to my attention. It is an opportunity to hear direct from the council about the position that it has now reached with regard to the possibility of imports of that size.

For Cornwall, which I understand is a possible alternative destination, a new site has been proposed which will require planning permission and, again, Cornwall county council as planning authority for waste disposal will consider any planning application that may be made in the normal way. Planning permissions and disposal licences or resolutions are normally granted subject to conditions which protect the use of the land and the amenity of the area for its residents. Proposals to alter the scale and nature of any operation would always have to satisfy the normal requirements for safeguarding the environment and the residents' health and amenity. The Government are therefore well apprised of the implications of the proposal, not only for Cheshire and Cornwall but for the country as a whole.

The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food maintains a constant vigilance against the risk of diseases coming into the country in products of animal and vegetable origin. Any would-be importers of any material would have to satisfy him that there were no dangers of carrying pests and diseases with that material. On that specific point, I have requested that officials from the Ministry are present tomorrow so that we can further discuss this specific and important point of concern. I also believe that in national terms the scale of the proposal raises serious questions on the availability of disposal facilities, not least in Cornwall and in Cheshire, on which it may be necessary to seek further powers.

Mr. Matthew Taylor

I thank the Minister for what he has said. In view of his last comment and his earlier comments on the national seriousness of the issue, may I ask whether he feels that such applications would be likely to be called in by the Department of the Environment for inquiry?

Mr. Moynihan

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I am not in a position to judge in general in regard to call-in. There is certainly no reason why applications of that type would not be considered for call-in. The hon. Gentleman will be the first to recognise—the House will understand this—that I cannot comment on a specific case in advance of all the details being brought to the attention of the responsible authorities.

Finally, in the last minute, I would also like to draw my hon. Friend's attention to the announcement today of the Government's decisions on proposed legislative changes on waste management. These proposals will strengthen and extend the powers of waste disposal authorities and extend responsibility for safe management of waste to producers and carriers. A further short consultation paper on amendments to the Control of Pollution Act 1974 will be issued shortly, dealing with matters arising from the consultation process or from events after the process was begun in 1986. Legislation will be introduced as soon as the parliamentary timetable permits.

All these issues, and all the points to which I have responded, underscore the seriousness with which the Government view the issue. It is a matter of pressing arid considerable importance as well as being of public interest. For that reason, not only will I be having a meeting tomorrow but I will be following up all the points that have been made this evening as a matter of priority so that we can ensure that the widespread public concern and strength of opinion that has been expressed from both sides of the House this evening are properly taken into account.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty minutes to Two o'clock.