Separation of Waste (England) Regulations 2025

Considered in Grand Committee

Moved by

That the Grand Committee do consider the Separation of Waste (England) Regulations 2025.

My Lords, these regulations were laid in draft before the House on 3 December 2024 and confirm the final policy position for simpler recycling in England. For too long, households in England have been presented with a muddled and confusing patchwork of approaches to bin collections. The Government’s simpler recycling reforms will ensure that across England people will be able to recycle the same materials, whether at home, work or school, putting an end to confusion over what can and cannot be recycled in different parts of the country.

We are all responsible for addressing our country’s waste problem, and we know that citizens want to play their part and recycle as much as possible but that they are frustrated by the limited and confusing recycling services. Through these reforms, we are empowering citizens to turn their good intentions into simple, effective actions. Simpler recycling is one of the three core pillars of the Government’s ambitious collection and packaging reforms, alongside the forthcoming deposit return scheme and the extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging. Together, we estimate that the collection and packaging reforms will support 21,000 jobs in our nations and regions and stimulate more than £10 billion of investment in recycling capability over the next decade. The reforms are also estimated to deliver carbon savings of more than 46 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2035, valued at over £10 billion in carbon benefits.

Since 2015, household recycling rates in England have plateaued at around 45%, decreasing to 43% in 2022, so we urgently need to take steps to improve the nation’s recycling performance. Simpler recycling will end the postcode lottery of bin collections in England by ensuring that all households and workplaces can recycle the same core waste streams: plastic, metal, glass, paper and card, and food waste, with garden waste for households upon request. Simpler recycling will improve services for householders by introducing weekly food collections for all households in England and kerbside plastic film collections. This will make a significant contribution towards meeting our ambition to recycle 65% of municipal waste by 2035 and our target to reduce residual waste generated per capita by 50% by 2042 compared with 2019 levels. Furthermore, these changes represent a critical first step towards meeting the commitment in our manifesto to transition to a resource-resilient, productive circular economy which delivers long-term, sustainable growth.

I draw noble Lords’ attention to the exemptions introduced by the instrument. The legislation to implement the core legislative requirements for simpler recycling was introduced by the previous Government through the Environment Act 2021. This legislation has already come into force; in practice, this means that simpler recycling will automatically come into effect, beginning in March 2025 for workplaces and March 2026 for households.

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on introducing the regulations before us, which I broadly support. I will direct my questions to two specific areas.

The Minister mentioned that guidance will be given to councils on the separate collections. My concern is around what guidance will be given by councils to households in particular. I remember chairing the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee at the time of the “horsegate” scandal, where people found that they were eating prepared foods—usually lasagne—made from horsemeat, not beef. It ended, I think, a lot of people’s desire to carry on eating these pre-prepared, highly expensive, undernutritious, highly salted foods. However, if you are a householder and you have one of these trays in front of you, it normally goes, I assume, in your food waste because it is highly contaminated—or the packet that the lasagne I have eaten was in will have to be rinsed sufficiently to ensure that it is not contaminated.

Who is going to guide households on what to do with such prepared food, where it is difficult to get rid of the residual food waste? How does the Minister intend to ensure that, if it goes into the paper recycling, which will now be a separate collection, this will not lead to greater contamination? How will guidance be given to households to ensure that there is no cross-contamination? How does the Minister plan to ensure that there will be no increase in cross-contamination because of the contaminated stuff going into the wrong recycling bin or plastic bag—whatever it is called—that we are going to be issued with?

I would also like to press the Minister on ensuring that a strong message will go out from the Government to councils that there will continue to be a mandatory weekly food waste collection. Anything less frequent than that will lead to vermin and a lot of highly undesirable threats to households, through no fault of their own.

My Lords, I made my maiden speech last week simply to make sure that I could speak in today’s debate. I congratulate the Minister on bringing these regulations forward; it is fair to say, I think, that they have been a long time in gestation. I recall, back in 2018, the resources and waste strategy setting out the idea of trying to get consistent recycling. I have to say, when I became the Secretary of State a while ago, I worked quite hard on this issue to try to get simpler recycling to achieve the outcomes that the Minister has set out.

There are a couple of issues I want to raise with the Minister; in particular, the fact that we are moving from a minimum of three bins to a minimum of four bins. At the time when we went through the process of trying to make it more straightforward for people to recycle, the best-performing councils in the country, by and large—I think, seven out of the top 10—had three bins. They did not have four. They had three. This is in significant contrast to certain parts of Wales, where there were up to nine bins. A lot of work was done on this at the time.

Paragraph 7.5 of the Explanatory Memorandum suggests that

“76% of consultation respondents agreed with the proposed exemption to allow co-collection of all dry recyclable waste streams in all circumstances”.

It is raised a few times in the impact assessment but, in particular, page 29 talks about how

“paper and card are particularly vulnerable to cross-contamination from food and liquid commonly found on other recycling”.

Will the Minister say where that evidence has come from and where is it shared? That has not been the experience of the highest-performing councils in the land. I am conscious that there has often been a psyche, a psychology or whatever phrase is the right one about the worry about consultation that my noble friend Lady McIntosh pointed out, but practice shows that that has not necessarily happened. Indeed, there could be an opportunity for Ministers to revisit this if this was not the case.

I am also conscious that in terms of these regulations, doing a TEEP exercise may seem quite straightforward to people, but actually it takes time, resource and money and is open to legal challenge. That is why I am concerned that we will see councils around the country which had originally thought there were going to be three bins. A couple of months ago, it increased to four. That adds complication to thinking about how you do your bin collection. One thing politicians know is that if you get bins wrong, you are really in trouble with your constituents.

I am just conscious that there has been quite a significant change. It may seem only a minor change. I appreciate that we might not get the answer today from the Minister—I know she a huge remit in her policy portfolio, but not directly this—but I think it would be worth while to share more understanding of why there has been such a change in the evidence that the Secretary of State decided to make that change.

In terms of an extra element of how this transpires, back nearly a year ago, or whenever it was, there was a consultation accompanied by draft statutory guidance, and a decision was made in May last year. I appreciate that it is perfectly acceptable for the Government to change their mind, but that was to remove the statutory guidance that originally was going to be laid alongside regulations to require a minimum of fortnightly collections. That has been dropped, and I say to the Minister that page 14 of the impact assessment refers specifically to the fact that a lot of the calculations have been done on the basis of fortnightly collections.

It was the case that about 80% of councils collected fortnightly and several continued to collect weekly. In fact, places such as Westminster and similar collect more than once a week. We had seen only about seven or eight councils move to three-weekly collections. My fear is that we are starting to see a massive acceleration, particularly in councils led by Greens or Liberal Democrats, towards three-weekly collection of basically residual waste. Of course, food waste will be required to be collected every week but, frankly, I am worried about environmental health issues that will start to arise as we start to see three-weekly collections. Indeed, in Bristol, the council has decided to move to four-weekly collections. I genuinely believe that this could become a real issue and that people might say that this is about money or about trying to require or encourage people to do even more recycling. I genuinely believe it is a mistake, and I hope in many ways I am proved wrong.

It is important to try to get a regular rhythm of collection and to avoid, frankly, quite smelly waste lingering in people’s driveways, especially in much more condensed accommodation. While councils can choose to do this weekly at the moment, and I understand some of the economic pressures they may feel under, it would be a retrograde step to go that way. I also do not know what consequences there would be for the impact assessment accompanying the regulations from that likely change away from fortnightly collections across the country.