Date:  20 October 2008

ESA at the Conservative Party Conference

ESA concluded its presence at the main party conferences with an event at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham.

Speaking at the meeting, entitled “Thinking outside the bin: What incentives are needed to encourage recycling and sustainable waste management?” and chaired by the Financial Times journalist Ms Fiona Harvey, were the then Conservative environment spokesman Greg Barker MP, Ms Anna Turley of the New Local Government Network (NLGN) and Ms Jessica Prendagast of the Social Market Foundation (SMF). Dirk Hazell spoke for ESA.

Mr Barker said that Conservatives had pledged to extend the landfill tax to give long term signals to the private sector. He added that they had identified the US Recyclebank scheme as a model of how to reward households for recycling and that people should be paid for recycling as there is an economic value to their waste.

Mr Hazell paid warm tribute to the work of Dr Caroline Jackson MEP in the European Parliament on the Waste Framework Directive and welcomed the Shadow Chancellor’s signal on the landfill tax. However, he warned that the Recyclebank pilot used precisely the technology which Mr Eric Pickles MP had slammed in the media, and said ESA would be happy to help the Party to resolve such inconsistencies.

Conservative councillors present at the meeting expressed concern at Mr Pickles’ recent proposal to ensure weekly waste collections in England and there was also considerable support for the use of energy from waste.

Elsewhere at the Conference…

ESA also attended a number of other events at conference of interest, including a discussion of the Conservative’s record on environmental policy development with the Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Peter Ainsworth MP who announced that Mr Archie Norman was chairing a group undertaking work for the party on business waste.

On the final day of the conference, in response, Mr Eric Pickles pledged that a future Conservative Government would scrap the new Planning Infrastructure Committee envisaged in the Planning Bill and other un-named quangos saying, “All you need to know about them is that they are: Useless; Pointless; And they are going to go”.

In the same speech Mr Pickles said that recycling needed to rise but that, at the current rate of cuts, weekly collections would disappear from Britain by 2013 and “the lesser-spotted wheelie bin now faced extinction”. He reiterated the pledge that a future Conservative Government would “provide funding to allow all councils to introduce proper weekly rubbish collections, on top of recycling” arguing that “Under a Conservative Government, the weekly bin collection will be back and recycling will go up.”

ENDS