“Enhancing
the quality of life”
Labour Party policy consultation document
Response from a policy forum of Bristol Area SERA on
Responses are associated with the numbered questions on page 17 of the
document.
1 and 4. Engaging the public. A
salutary way of engaging and educating the public is through taxation. Increasing taxes on energy, petrol and waste
are necessary to achieve the targets of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases, as well as conserving finite resources. The taxes will be unpopular among some vocal
special interests but public support can be won if the revenue is visibly
transferred to reducing taxes on labour and subsidising measures to reduce
pollution and increase energy efficiency (including support for public
transport, insulation of buildings and non-polluting methods of waste disposal)
2. More sustainable use of
resources. The moves to increase the share of energy produced from
renewable sources should be accelerated.
There are already a wide range of these of proven effectiveness –
wind-power (especially off-shore), wave, tide, biomass (including quick-growing
willow, straw, chicken shed litter etc), photo-voltaic and possibly hydrogen
cell and pyrolisis with gasification of waste. It is often quoted that
The aspiration to produce 20% of electricity from renewables
by 2020 should be converted into a Government target so as to give confidence
to investors and developers to take the necessary decisions to achieve
this. Investment, both public and
private will sometimes take several years to become fruitful but will continue
to pay off for a much longer period.
Efforts to increase the efficient use of energy in both new and existing
buildings through building regulations and further assistance to home energy
conservation (insulation, efficient heating systems, Combined Heat and Power
schemes, energy-conserving lighting etc) need to be increased and targets set.
3. Waste. Residual waste is
an admission of defeat. Before we
consider collection, recycling, centralised composting and ultimate disposal we
have to give attention to the earlier stages in the Waste Hierarchy – reduction
or prevention and re-use. The throw-away
culture is attractive to a relatively wealthy society with conspicuous
consumption and a rapid turnover of fashion goods; prepared and packaged meals
are attractive to time-poor individuals; it is often too difficult or expensive
to repair equipment, clothes, shoes, furniture, vehicles – easier as well as
sometimes satisfying to buy a new one; but all this is ultimately propagated
for private profit and maintained by advertising. We need to return to making things which
last longer or can be repaired or re-used.
Shatter-proof milk bottles should replace plastic containers (but
plastic beer glasses rather than glass, for other reasons), the new re-usable
nappies should replace disposables, and re-chargeable batteries should be
encouraged. The speed with which surplus
items left outside houses with an invitation to new users to help themselves
indicates that there is room for much more cost-free re-use.
We believe that awareness of the seriousness of the waste problem is
already high among the public and that many of them are conscientious about
trying to recycle as much as possible of their domestic waste. It is well known
that
Contractors exploit the obligation of local authorities to achieve
recycling targets to make excessive charges for collection. Recycling firms also take advantage of their
position and some authorities have the choice of paying them to take paper and
plastic off their hands or paying the tax to dump them back into landfill. Recycling is increasingly an essential public
service and both collection and recycling should be under public ownership.
Landfill of refuse is undesirable except in unusual geological
conditions and should continue to be taxed and, as quickly as possible, banned
altogether other than in exceptional geological conditions.
Incineration is not the cheap alternative which it is treated as; it
merely reduces landfill, redistributes pollution, together with greenhouse
gases, into the atmosphere. We are
concerned that some local authorities have entered into long-term contracts
requiring them to maintain a supply of waste to an incinerator operator: this
not only opens them to financial penalties if they fall short but reduces the
incentive to develop waste reduction or recycling and makes it harder to
operate such schemes. No new incinerators
should be built. Landfill and
incinerators create very few jobs; recycling and composting provide far
more.
We have studied the use of pyrolisis and
gasification as developed by Compact Power at Avonmouth;
this claims to convert various categories of waste to energy while minimising
carbon dioxide emissions, eliminating the release of dioxins and other
pollutants and leaving only limited quantities of inert residue, while being
economic on a scale small enough to remove the need to transport the initial
waste over more than a short distance.
If these claims can be substantiated we believe this method should be
encouraged.
The landfill tax has coincided with an increase in fly-tipping. Fly tipping seriously detracts from the
attractiveness of the countryside and adds to the unpleasantness of many urban
streets and green spaces; like abandoned cars it also encourages arson. We have
been advised “that local authorities powers to prosecute are minimal” (South
Gloucestershire Council 18.6.03). Is so
they should be strengthened. Resources
should be increased for services for local authorities to collect and, if
possible recycle, bulky household objects quickly and reliably as many
householders find it difficult or even impossible to dispose of them or to
store them in the meantime (if you live in a small flat and don’t have access
to a lorry or van what do you do with a worn-out mattress?). The service should be free because any charge
will encourage some people to dump on the street.
Most debate has been about what to do with household waste, because it
involves action by more than 20 million units.
This amounts to 28 million tonnes in England and Wales each year but is
dwarfed by 30 million tonnes from commerce, 48 million tonnes from industry and
300 million tonnes from construction, demolition, agriculture, mining,
quarrying, sewage and dredging. It is
not enough to assume that the producers of 93% of all wastes are sufficiently
aware of the economic advantage to them and their obligation to the environment
to devise ways of preventing, re-using, recycling, minimising and safely
disposing of them.
Agreement with the Newspaper Publishers Association on increasing the
recycled content of newsprint is welcomed, as are the various Directives emanating
from the European Union on the disposal of refrigerators, electrical and
electronic goods and end-of-use vehicles but planning to cope with these
Directives before they come into force, and providing sufficient resources to
local authorities and other public bodies to operate them, needs to be
considerably improved.
The Regulations on packaging of 1997 and 1998 required most businesses
to recover 52% of the packaging waste they generate by 2001 and to recycle at
least half of it. We do not see whether
and how this is being implemented and we now have the ludicrous practice of
plastic shrink wrapping individual items of fruit and vegetables.
The Government’s Waste Strategy 2000 promised “We will develop an
initiative on producer responsibility for junk mail, working with the Direct
Marketing Association and other trade bodies”.
We have seen no evidence of this and any reduction of junk mail, if it
has occurred, has been because of its partial replacement by e-mailed
“spam”. On the whole junk mail is
unpopular with the public and action to reduce it would be welcomed.
At present it is not possible to win public confidence on the management
of radioactive waste (page 6), because there is no known way of safely
disposing of it. The first step is to
stop producing more of it. The Energy
White Paper does not include any proposal to build new nuclear power stations
but it retains the option of doing so if it is necessary to meet the target for
carbon reduction. We welcome the
exclusion but the option should be renounced, more should be done to develop
renewable sources of energy and to improve efficiency in the use of energy and
the remaining nuclear power stations should be closed immediately. We are aware that radioactive waste will be
produced as a result of the decommissioning. The waste should not be
reprocessed because the reprocessing is unsafe at present and the product
unacceptable. Research should
concentrate on finding a safe method of disposal. Meanwhile the waste should be stored at a
limited number of sites where it can be kept safe from weather,
earth-movements, theft and sabotage and
avoiding the dangers that have arisen in, for example, the former USSR.
5. Access to the countryside
requires the most generous possible interpretation of the extent of the new
National Parks and of the Right to Roam (Countryside and Rights of Way
Act). The Act does not include a right
to roam on cliffs, the foreshore, woods and the banks of rivers, canals and
lakes; it should be extended to cover these.
Many of the groups mentioned will not be able to make use of their right
of access without the availability of public transport, particularly buses
which will often require a subsidy. Bus
access has the added advantage of reducing the impact of a greater number of
cars on countryside roads and sites. We
have experience of the contribution of the subsidised Chew Valley Explorer bus
service and the branch railway from Bristol Temple Meads to
11. More sustainable farming. A large and growing proportion of consumers
would like to eat organic food but many are deterred by the cost. On the other hand 70% of organic food bought
is imported, the fund for subsidising British farmers to go organic was
over-subscribed and many British farmers who went organic are withdrawing as
the initial subsidies expire. A target
should be set to have 30% of agricultural land farmed organically by 2010
should be set and financially supported; supermarket chains should be stopped from
forcing down prices to organic farmers primarily to increase their profits and
with only limited reduction in prices to
shoppers; and since the planting of GM crops is (in the present state of
science) the death knell for organic farming this is another argument for not
allowing it – there is a large demand for organic produce, there is almost none
for GM products.
Existing subsidies on
conventional farm production has come to mainly benefit very large farmers and
corporations and have been accompanied by intensive methods, excessive use of
fertilisers and pesticides, grubbing up of hedgerows and degradation of the
countryside. They have failed to protect
the small farm. Subsidies should be
switched to organic production and to paying farmers to protect the rural
environment.
13. Food poverty. Four
million people in the UK cannot afford a healthy diet (Rowntree
Foundation, Poverty and social exclusion
in Britain), up to 5,000 people in each parliamentary constituency may be
malnourished (Dr Howard Stoate MP), 40% of people
admitted to hospital are malnourished (Dr Stoate),
one in seven people over 65 (up to 2 million people) are malnourished or at
serious risk of malnourishment (Malnutrition Advisory Group), a diet suitable
for pregnancy is unaffordable for one in four pregnant women who live in
poverty so that their babies are much more likely to suffer from a low
birth-weight and thereby a greater risk of infant death, disability or chronic
health conditions in later life (J Dallison and T Lobstein Poor
expectations: poverty and undernourishment in
pregnancy; A MacFarlane and M Mugford Birth counts:
statistics of pregnancy and childbirth).
The reasons for this situation include income poverty; failure to obtain
benefit entitlements, sometimes because of the complexity of the regulations;
the advertising of cheaper, unhealthy foods;
food deserts (Lord Whitty’s phrase, also
recognised in the Government’s Social Exclusion Unit’s Neighbourhood renewal consultation paper, for large networks of
streets and estates where there are either no shops selling fruit and
vegetables or fruit and vegetables are only available from small shops at high
prices); the domination of food shopping by supermarkets and out of town
hypermarkets, which poor families without access to a car (86% of households
with incomes between £60 and £150 a week – C Hawkes
and others A battle in store? A
discussion of the social impact of the major
Further action is required to regulate the development and expansion of
supermarkets, control the advertisement of unhealthy foods and encourage food
co-ops. The Party should also give full
support to the Food Justice Strategies Bill which would require the Government
to provide funding for each local authority, in conjunction with other relevant
interests, to implement a strategy to eradicate food poverty as far as
reasonably practicable within not more than 15 years. Suzi Leather, who
has become Deputy Chair of the Food Standards Agency, has calculated that
anyone spending more than 30% of their income on food is in food poverty, while
for the poorest fifth of the population a healthy diet would cost more than
30%.
15. Genetic modification. The
debate initiated by the Government has already taken place and has been
described as “The widest formal public debate every conducted in
21. Best practice. It should be made mandatory for companies to report
the quantity of waste they produce after all recycling, their total water and
energy use and carbon dioxide generated.