HL Deb 13 November 1974 vol 354 cc783-98

3.3 p.m.

LORD DARLING OF HILLSBOROUGH rose to call attention to the Green Paper War on Waste—A Policy for Reclamation (Cmnd. 5727); and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I do not know whether it is very unusual for a debate of this kind to be opened with a maiden speech. I am pleased to see that the letter "M" is not against my name on the list of speakers. I should explain that on the many subjects discussed here during the last few weeks this is my first opportunity to make a non-partisan speech. Now that the opportunity comes along my noble friends have prevailed upon me to open the debate. In the circumstances I think I cannot ask for the usual indulgence; I hope any noble Lords wishing to interrupt me will not hesitate to do so. But my noble friends fail to realise the difficulty that I and the House are in, because this is a very wide subject. It covers wide-ranging social policies involving clearing up the environment. It is concerned with a large group of industries having an annual turnover of about £2,000 million, and we are seeking ways and means of doubling that figure.

We are also examining many exciting new projects to make better use of waste, ranging from fish farms and animal feed to new types of materials that can be created from the waste that is now considered useless and which we throw away. The Green Paper presents a comprehensive policy for the recovery of useful materials from industrial waste and domestic refuse. That is its purpose. It is not a complete policy as expressed in the Green Paper. It sets out clearly enough what might be achieved from widespread reclamation and indicates the lines of action that could be followed to attain the maximum extraction of useful materials.

But this statement of policy is just the beginning. As the Green Paper points out, it is the basis of what must quickly become a national drive to cut down waste and promote ways of recovering and re-utilising the materials. It rests on three essential objectives. First, to stop pollution, poisoning the land and water courses with the dumping of toxic wastes; to stop the poisoning effluent that goes into so many of our streams and rivers; and also to stop poisoning the air with the emission of chemical fumes. Secondly, to stop squandering the many scarce industrial materials that are likely to be worked out within a short space of time unless new world resources can be found. Thirdly, to ease our balance of payments by extracting from our own resources materials that we import on too lavish a scale.

I am sure that no one in the country will quarrel with those objectives. What we have to consider is how we achieve them and what needs to be done to make sure that everything that it would pay us to get from our resources will be extracted. All these matters are interdependeni. It is necessary to show in essentially practical ways how each type of waste or refuse can be usefully treated and processed, and then, by using what the Green Paper calls "incentives and disincentives", compel or persuade industries and local authorities to go in for large-scale reclamation on the basis of practical research and development.

It is not difficult to see what is likely to happen if we properly use the "incentives and disincentives" that the Green Paper indicates, or more or less hints at, not spelling anything out at this stage, which is understandable because the range of activity that is involved here is so vast it would be impossible to go into all the details in a document of this size. But let me take first the local authorities and the difficulties and the possibilities that they have. Your Lordships will know that under the Local Government Acts district councils are given the responsibility of collecting refuse, most of it domestic, some of it industrial waste, while the county authorities have the job of disposing of it. Under the Control of Pollution Act the county authorities have to designate the disposal sites, arrange some form of control over them, and put their plans forward to the Department of the Environment for approval. The Act says that they may engage in reclamation, but this is obviously a long-term prospect which is not expected to be included in any immediate plans which the local authorities put forward.

We can already see what is happening and what is likely to happen. The so-called controlled sites will still be dumping places for untreated and often poisonous waste. There is a report in the papers this week which tells us that toxic chemicals and waste oil are being dumped in controlled lagoons in Essex at the rate of 1,000 road tankers a week. This is going on all over the country, though perhaps not quite on that scale. But the point I am making is that it is going into controlled sites. Even when a county authority takes a sterner view of its responsibilities, as in the case of my own county of South Yorkshire, this does not stop the dumping of rubbish; it just puts the sites in more suitable places for rubbish disposal. Because reclamation is very largely an economic problem, which I will refer to later, it is well to look at the cost of providing suitable dumping sites. South Yorkshire conveniently provide the figures for us as they have just published their programme for the next two years. In this relatively small county they are going to open up 25 sites in the next two years, which will be carefully fenced and screened with trees, manned all around the clock, at a cost of £400,000. It is well to bear figures of that magnitude in mind, because in the final calculations of the economics of reclamation these social costs must be taken into account when we decide whether or not propositions for better reclamation are going to pay for themselves.

Of course, it is better to extract usable and saleable materials from this waste, rather than dump it, if only to offset that social cost; but because local authorities have not been given any guidance on the types of treatment plants that they could establish, or any guidance at all on whether or not they will get any financial aid for this kind of project, they are, as in South Yorkshire, more or less inviting the community to go on dumping their old bicycles, tin cans, domestic appliances and other discarded materials, but only on selected sites. No other change is made. So that the lead, the zinc, the mercury from batteries, the copper and aluminium from electric apparatus and old saucepans, the steel from washing machines and so on, and all the plastic, rubber, paper, glass and everything else which could be usefully extracted will go on being buried. This is a foolish policy that must be ended as soon as we can possibly get round to doing it. At some point—and this is where the disincentives come in—we must have a legal prohibition on this kind of dumping.

One can understand the Government's reluctance at this stage to impose a duty on local authorities to set up treatment plants instead of using these dumps. Not enough research has been done, in this country at any rate, to find the most suitable types of treatment plant. There are many operating overseas that we could look at to see whether they could operate in this country; and I am glad to note from recent Government statements that the money and the facilities available at the Government's Warren Springs Laboratory are to be extended to do this kind of work. There are, however, two propositions which I think should be borne in mind, which emerge from research and practical experience. The first concerns the separation of waste, and here I disagree with some of the propositions in the Green Paper. Apart from waste paper, it is a mistake to believe that housewives will separate domestic refuse into different containers. They have tried experiments in other countries, such as in the United States, but apart from paper—and even that not on a 100 per cent. basis—it simply does not work. So that separation of the different types of waste, which is really the beginning of treatment and extraction processes, will have to be done mechanically.

This means—and we had better look at the figures—going back to my county of South Yorkshire, that that county will have to set up one or more treatment plants, if we are to have, as I suggest, mechanical separation and sorting, to deal with something like 1,500 tons of domestic refuse every day; and if, as will almost certainly happen, the plant has also to take in a lot of industrial waste, the daily quantity will perhaps be double that figure. This is a very big operation, but instead of spending £400,000 on just getting sites for this purpose I think it would be better—though I do not know what the figures are—to, shall I say, treble the sum and set up the treatment plants, because that is what is needed.

Of course, one then comes to the question of whether we can afford it. Money is tight, and the Government do not want to spend much more money on public enterprises of this kind; but they clearly involve considerable capital investment. The other proposition which I say we should bear in mind—and I have no time to elaborate it, so I must ask that my word be taken for it at this stage—is that every kind of domestic and industrial waste can be processed to produce usable materials for recycling or for clean landfill, or for anything. Nothing need be wasted, but whether we need treatment plants that recover everything depends, of course, upon the economic factors involved.

My Lords, let me try to put this in perspective by looking briefly at the con- servation aspect. Geologists tell us, as I mentioned before, that the world's deposits of some materials—copper, lead, zinc and so on—will be completely worked out at the present rate of con-sumption within 20 to 50 years unless new resources are found. It is an alarming prospect; and it would be danger-ously foolish in my opinion to imagine that new deposits will be found, perhaps in the sea-bed, and to rely on that, rather than to conserve what we have to the best of our ability; or to imagine that adequate substitutes will be found during this very short period. I think that complacency of this kind is completely fatuous.

Furthermore, a new factor has now to be taken into account. Most of the deposits that we are working for these scarce materials are in the emerging, underdeveloped countries, and they have just been given a very good example, in the case of Middle East oil, of what they should do to conserve their resources and to get a bigger return for what they sell out of their own countries. The tin producers have had buffer-stock arrangements to keep prices stable as far as possible, but those arrangements have now been seen to be inadequate. The bauxite producers in the Caribbean are getting together to control their own supplies and the prices that they will get for them. None of them intends to leave the prices for the things they sell, or to leave the quantities that they can sell, to speculative commodity markets. They are going to be closed—not immediately, but this is a prospect that we must bear in mind when we are thinking of what we can get out of our own resources. It seems to me that we would serve our own national interest by extracting from waste all the scarce materials we possibly can instead of throwing the stuff away.

The metal industries' figures are in the Green Paper. The metal industries recover very large proportions of waste, most of it arising from their own works processes, but they would clearly be far better off with nearer to 100 per cent. recovery than the figures given in the Green Paper. I do not think I need to stress the balance-of-payments case for reducing imports. The figures I have given of what is now euphemistically called "being saved" by using our own indigenous waste to produce raw material is around £2,000 million a year. The Green Paper postulates that by an expansion of present methods of dealing with waste this can be increased by about £400 million (some people put it as high as £500 million) a year. But what we really must aim at is to double, if we can, that figure of import saving, something from £2,000 million to £4,000 million.

We have a large reclamation industry at work; it employs very sophisticated plant, and to think of the Steptoe image in terms of these operations is completely wrong. There is £65 million worth of capital plant being used in the reclamation industries and they employ something like 50,000 workers, so there is a good basis for expansion. I do not want to go much further; I have tried to present very briefly and inadequately the social and conservationist arguments for a concerted reclamation policy.

I now want to look at the industrial problems which industries must face in utilising recycled materials on a larger scale than at present. For a policy of this kind, as explained in the Green Paper, the most serious difficulty, if we are to have massive reclamation schemes, lies in reconciling the inelastic supply of recycled materials to the elastic demands of the products of the using industries. It was this operation of market forces that destroyed the paper salvage scheme after the War when all the pulp that the paper mills required could be obtained from abroad at lower costs than were involved in bringing waste paper into the mills and the processes for dealing with waste paper; so they stopped taking waste paper and local authorities stopped collecting it. The mills now require waste paper because of the high price of pulp, so the salvage schemes are being started again.

However, if the local authorities, the scrap merchants and the waste processors are geared up for an almost complete recovery of the materials about which we are speaking and they are using expensive plant for the purpose then they cannot operate on a "stop-go" basis. Their supplies should be regular and they will need long-term contracts in prices and deliveries so that everything which they collect, process and make available will be taken. But if the using-industries' markets weaken and if import costs fall below the contract prices for reclaimed material then the contracts which they make will be a financial burden. Most scrap is difficult to store. It is bulky and most of it deteriorates in store. Therefore we have to find an answer to this dilemma.

I think the answer is twofold: first of all, wherever it is possible to do so the scrap should go through a primary process for easier storing, perhaps with some fiscal relief—I think this may be necessary—to cover the storage costs. Secondly, the contracts should include some kind of deficiency payments scheme so that if import prices fall below the cost of home supplies this can be covered. We have operated it before in agriculture and I regret that we got rid of it. This is the same problem. A national reclamation policy cannot operate except in guaranteed markets. They must have stability. This need not be costly. The British Steel Corporation, for instance, would have been about £15 million better-off a year or so ago if instead of cutting off scrap supplies when the market for steel went down it had still continued to take scrap and had turned it into ingots which can be fairly easily stored. Fifteen million pounds is the price that had to be paid to import ingots of semi-finished steel and also to cover the fact that the orders they could have taken could not have been fulfilled because of this lack of steel ingots. I hope that the British Steel Corporation and the steel industry as a whole has learned this lesson.

My Lords, that is very briefly the Green Paper's outline of what we must seek to achieve, but its policy is still to be initiated and developed. The policy document is only a blueprint at this stage and there must be some authority to ensure that so far as possible it is put into operation. The Green Paper proposes that the planning of these developments and, as it were, operating the policy should be assigned to a Waste Management Advisory Council. I suppose it would be composed of some representatives of the local authorities, the reclamation industries, the industries that create waste, the industries which use waste, everybody who is engaged in research on this business—a kind of representative council that I am sure your Lordships will agree could become a useless mass meeting. It needs to have some kind of Executive. I hope it will be small enough to be effective. It will not be an effective body unless its advice is backed by some authority to put it into operation.

The Green Paper proposes that that authority should be invested in the Department of the Environment and the Department of Industry, and here I should like to say how pleased I am that the Government have appointed two Ministers with special responsibilities in this field. I suppose that the two Ministers when they sit in control of this Advisory Council will give the Council a very big programme of work to be carried out: first of all, a comprehensive plan of research. As I said, far too little is being undertaken in this country and it is spread over too many Governmental, industrial and university institutions.

According to my reckoning—and I may be wrong about this, I have tried to calculate it as carefully as I can—there are fewer than 50 scientists and technicians in the whole country engaged on work of this kind, and much of their work is being duplicated because nobody is coordinating it. It needs to be co-ordinated and the gaps need to be filled. The research does not need to start from scratch in all cases because much has been done overseas, particularly in the United States, and the results are freely available. But I would press the Government—and I hope I have support in this—to go ahead without delay and appoint the Advisory Council. I do not think legislation is needed for it; I think it can be done by Government decision, but in any case we want it set up quickly and with sufficient finance for the work to be started with an adequate staff.

My Lords, I have spoken for too long but I have not covered all the ground which the Green Paper covers. I have dealt with only a small part of an immense field. I have not mentioned the work that still needs to be done to find substitute materials, and to achieve the redesigning of products so that reclamation and recycling can be done far more easily and cheaply than it is now. Nor have I dealt with the problem, which I am sure will be referred to in the debate, of excessive packaging, which is a burden on all the waste disposal authorities in the country. I have not entered a plea which I think needs to be developed—I mentioned it only casually—for the Government to give a lead by requiring a proportion of recycled waste to be included in all the possible materials which they purchase, starting with paper. Indeed, the more one examines the whole subject of reclamation, the more one sees that the prospect which opens is for a big industrial expansion in many new fields, based on our own industries and our own indigenous resources and operated for the nation's economic benefit.

My Lords, I conclude by trying to answer the question that I posed: can we afford the capital investment involved and the many changes in industrial processes which will have to follow? I am convinced that from every aspect—a cleaner environment, the saving of scarce materials and the improvement of our balance of payments—we cannot afford to neglect the opportunities presented here for going ahead with the policy set out in the Green Paper. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

3.33 p.m.

LORD SANDFORD

My Lords, I should like to start by complimenting the noble Lord on his speech. But I think that I must first address myself to the noble Baroness, Lady Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe, and make three points. First of all, I think it is unheard of—certainly, it has been so in my fifteen years' experience of the House—for a noble Lord to make his maiden speech in introducing a debate before he has spoken in another one. Secondly, I think all noble Lords, particularly those taking part in this debate, would want me to protest at the fact that the letter "M" is missing from the noble Lord's name on the list. Thirdly, I wish to protest on my own behalf in that, having inquired from the noble Baroness's office yesterday whether or not this was a maiden speech, I was told it was not. Having said that, may I acquit the noble Lord himself of any blame in this procedural matter. He is a newcomer—and a very welcome one—to our House and cannot possibly be held to blame. I should like to go on immediately and to—

BARONESS LLEWELYN-DAVIES OF HASTOE

My Lords, may I say at once that, in the first place, the entire responsibility is mine. I had inquired and I thought that in the mélée of the last Session the noble Lord had "broken his duck". I was wrong about that and take the entire responsibility for it, and I apologise for any embarrassment that my noble friend has suffered. However, may I say to the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, that what has been done is not, in fact, unheard of. It is certainly the custom of the House that this does not happen, but it is not unheard of. Nevertheless, I take entire responsibility. I apologise to my noble friend that the magic letter "M" is not after his name, but I think that all noble Lords present will know that his is a maiden speech.

LORD SANDFORD

My Lords, the whole House will be grateful to the noble Baroness, I am sure, and I am only sorry that this matter should have intervened in this debate. I want to go on immediately to compliment the noble Lord on his maiden speech, and to say how much the whole House will value it. Last time we were debating this subject four and a half years ago on a Motion of my noble friend Lady Emmet of Amberley, I believe that the noble Lord had just become, or had just been invited to become, chairman of a group established by the waste trades to go into this whole business, and we are therefore particularly glad to have the benefit of his experience in that field and to know that he retains his interest in the subject. The noble Lord's speech was marked by a close knowledge of the subject and incisiveness, the lack of which would be one of my criticisms of the Green Paper. In any case, we are very glad to hear him address us and look forward to his doing so again on many future occasions.

My Lords, I have not yet had the opportunity from the Dispatch Box personally to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, to the environmental arena. I am glad that she is there now and that we have a Minister in this House who can address herself wholeheartedly to this large field. I am sure that she will have already discovered that doing battle on fronts which fully occupy six or seven Ministers in another place calls for nimbleness and versatility, and for many other qualities as well. I should like to wish her well and I think we can pledge our support in a number of fields on which she will be speaking to us, though we cannot guarantee her an easy ride on every occasion.

To turn to the subject of waste, this is now, rightly, a matter for earnest concern, if not one that arouses passionate debate like some other topics with which we have to deal, even when a clarion call to a war on waste is made as in a Green Paper. Nevertheless, it is an important subject and in the last few months and years it has become much more urgent than it was when my noble friend Lady Emmet of Amberley put it before us four and a half years ago. The concern to husband carefully the world's resources, all of which are finite, was widely thought until recently to be a sphere for devoted cranks and rather impractical visionaries. Now, and particularly since last winter when so many basic commodities—not only oil—have so vastly increased in price, the need for better husbandry is a matter of the greatest practical moment, not just for prophets and visionaries, but for practical statesmen.

The public adjustment to the realities which we now face in the conservation of resources is already becoming a painful process for us. It now affects us all. It affects many more in the less favoured countries, and affects them far more painfully than it does us at the moment. But the inconvenience which we now feel in this country and the suffering that many more already endure elsewhere, are as nothing compared to what we, and, even more, our successors, will face if we do not now come to terms with the need to conserve the resources which we have on this planet, to share them more widely and to use them less wastefully. The avoiding of waste in the first instance and the re-use of avoidable waste are essential and integral parts of this husbandry and stewardship of resources. In so far as this Green Paper signifies a determination by the Government to grapple in a resolute way with the proper husbandry of resources, it is most welcome, and I would assure the noble Baroness that she can count on our support for any sensible measures that are proposed in due course.

The Waste Management Advisory Council and the Advisory Group on Waste Paper Recycling, the two bodies mentioned in the Paper, will have our best wishes for the work set before them when they have been established. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, will be able to-day to go beyond what her right honourable friend Mr. Howell said in another place last May about the intention to set them up. We have now their terms of reference and we need to know in addition who they are, when they are going to start work and how they are going to approach their first pieces of work.

To turn to the Green Paper, I think it is as well for the noble Baroness that my noble friend the late Lord Conesford is not here, because I think he would have found this Paper much too full of platitudes for his liking. It is one of a shower of Papers which came out between the last two Elections, and has all the marks of having been cobbled together rather hurriedly and before a good deal of the detailed work that needs to be done was ready to be done. In fact, much of the information in this Paper is a good deal less precise than the information put before the House in our last debate by the then Minister, the late Lord Delacourt-Smith. There is not a great deal that is new, nor is there a great deal that is very incisive, but there are a number of emphases that are either missing or false; but these are points I shall come to in a moment. The topic which forms an integral part of the urgent and important task of husbanding world resources, and those of this Kingdom in particular, deserves more penetrating treatment than it gets in this Paper.

I should like now to turn to some of the missing and false emphases, as I would see them. The Paper rightly makes the point in five or six places that one of the most urgent things to do is to see that products are designed to last longer. A waste prevention policy, I would say, comes first, before a waste policy; that is, a policy which seeks in a number of practical ways to reduce significantly the excessive number of "throw-away" products which are deliberately designed not to last.

The first specific question I should like to ask the noble Baroness to answer, if she can. is whether the terms of reference of the WMAC, set out on page 30, do or do not embrace this field. It is suggested that they should have regard to the best use of resources. Does that mean that they are to address themselves to the formulation of policies secured to achieve that end? I am not sufficiently confident that such is the case. If it is not so, whose job is it to do that?—because it seems to me that the first step in the war on waste is not as stated at Chapter 2, paragraph 23, on page 7, that we must at least endeavour to recover everything that can be made to pay for the cost of reclamation. That is not the first step. The first step is to avoid the unnecessary creation of waste. In paragraph 20 of Chapter 2 the Paper makes the rather coy statement that— … market forces may in some cases even favour the more extravagant, shorter-lived product … Of course that is so. In fact, there is often a deliberate manipulation of market forces to do exactly that. So that is one field where I think the emphasis is wrong. I am not satisfied that the terms of reference are right and I should be grateful if the noble Baroness could say more about them.

Another point where I believe the emphasis to be wrong is to put so much on a widespread, indiscriminate and universal campaign of activity and publicity. For example, in Chapter 3 paragraph 12 we read the confident recommendation—and this was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Darling—that taking care of waste paper is one of the things we could do better if separate collection by local authorities were arranged. The issues regarding waste paper are set out in Chapter 3, paragraphs 14 to 19. Your Lordships devoted a lot of time to this during our last debate and in fact the late Lord Delacourt-Smith was able to go into rather more detail on that occasion than the Paper does here. But the wrong approach to this kind of thing—and I give this only as an example—is advocated over and over again in this Paper. We have in paragraph 15 on page 10 talk of "a major concerted effort"; and in paragraph 25 of Chapter 3 "the greatest possible public participation" is mentioned. In Chapter 6, paragraph 12 we have a refererce to "a major publicity campaign". The late Lord Delacourt-Smith said when we were last debating this that more than comprehensive, indiscriminate and universal campaigns we need well planned local campaigns and well planned local activity which are designed to deal with the local sources of supply and waste material and the local markets. I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to confirm that it is that approach, rather than the broad-brush one, which the Government will in the end favour.

I should like to turn to one other emphasis which I think is missing from this Paper and which ought to be there. That concerns the reclamation of waste land. The Aberfan disaster was very near to our minds four years ago, and this topic was well to the fore; but here only in Chapter 3, paragraph 24 is there a mention of waste land, and that is as a possible place on which to tip other waste material. But, my Lords, I would put it to you that in this country of all countries—so densely populated—the reclamation of waste land is a matter of major importance, and the need to ensure more positive use of it for all sorts of purposes, but especially in the urban fringe for recreation (which is where a lot of the dereliction lies), is particularly important. I should be grateful, and I believe others would be, too, if the noble Baroness could say more about this and about the progress which is being made, including which of the main reclamation authorities are up to their target on clearing the worst by 1980, and what is going on about putting it to more positive uses. In that connection, could the noble Baroness tell us, too, about the progress of the Verney Committee on the use of aggregates, and particularly the use of waste material for building purposes? The Building Research Station has done a lot of research on which waste materials can be used in what way for what building purposes, and now it is a question of getting the construction industry to use these materials more frequently. This is another example of the kind of policy which the noble Lord, Lord Darling, was advocating, and I was glad that he stressed it.

Finally—and this is another major criticism, I fear—I do not detect in the Green Paper what I would assume to be a more fruitful understanding by the Government of the role of voluntary bodies in all this. I am sure this is not the stage, in this particular field at any rate, at which to regard the voluntary bodies as auxiliaries and supplementary agencies to what the local authorities are doing. What is much more necessary at this stage is for the voluntary bodies to stimulate and prod the local authorities into action where they are inactive, and to criticise policies where they are wrong. This is a much more uncomfortable role for Central Government and local government, but I think it is the right role for the voluntary bodies to adopt at this stage in this field. I should like to know what plans the Government have for stimulating and encouraging the work of voluntary bodies in this field, and what particular bodies, and also what mechanism of support and assistance they have in mind. Effective liaison at local level—which is the phrase the Paper uses—may not be right particularly if it is as cosy as chapter 3, paragraph 26 suggests. That is the kind of phrasing which indicates to me that the Government at the moment are misjudging the most effective role for voluntary bodies in this field.

My Lords, I am afraid I have concentrated, as I think it is right for the Opposition to do, on the points about this Paper which I want to criticise. All sides welcome the fact that the Paper has come out at all and the indications in it that the Government take this matter seriously and intend to do something about it. They will welcome it even more if the noble Baroness is able to take us beyond what we read in this Green Paper.