Environment and Rural Development Committee, 19 Jan 2005

Meeting date: Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Official Report 211KB pdf

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Proposed Plastic Bag Environmental Levy Bill

Our second agenda item involves a similar discussion to the previous one. The second member's bill proposal before us today is by Mike Pringle for a plastic bag environmental levy. Members will have received some paperwork, including a copy of the draft proposal for the bill, a statement of reasons, a consultation document relating to the proposed bill and a list of consultees. I welcome Mike Pringle and David Cullum of the Parliament's non-Executive bills unit. As with Mark Ruskell's bill, I invite Mike Pringle to make a short opening statement before I open the floor to members for questions or comment.

Thank you for allowing me to come before the committee and for considering my proposal this morning. I know what committees sometimes think of opening statements, so I shall be brief. As many of you know, I first lodged the proposal back in October 2003. At that time, it gained a considerable amount of publicity, leading to numerous interviews and an appearance by me on the Lesley Riddoch show, an experience that I am not sure I want to repeat. I then went on to consultation, back in February 2004, which lasted for three months and which, as you will see from the papers, had a huge response from a wide range of organisations. From the 250 consultation papers distributed, we received 126 substantive responses—that is a superb response rate by any stretch of the imagination. That figure does not include the large number of smaller responses that we got from the general public.

The bill has certainly caught the public imagination and we received further publicity for the proposal when both IKEA and B&Q implemented charging schemes last year, both of which have been extremely successful. The retail sector, the plastic bag industry, councils and environmental groups have been involved in the consultation and I feel that, under the new rules, the consultation that has been carried out means that a further consultation is probably not now required. I hope that the committee will agree with me. I am happy to answer questions.

A number of us got an e-mail from a member of the public who was concerned that the responses to the original proposal will now never be considered or released. I think that that is a complete misunderstanding, but it would be useful to put on the record the fact that everything related to the consultation will be treated in exactly the same way as material relating to any consultation for any bill. It will all be published and made available.

Absolutely.

I responded to that member of the public to clarify that all responses made to the initial draft proposal by Mike Pringle would be made public, unless somebody had specified that they did not want their response to be made public. As with the previous bill, we are not testing whether the principles of the bill are right. We are trying to test whether the consultation has been carried out properly. All the responses will be fed through to whichever committee scrutinises the bill.

There was some concern that the bill proposal has changed and I suppose that the same questions arise as those that we asked Mark Ruskell. Can you give us a sense of the extent to which the proposal has been changed in the light of the consultation and of the extent to which that will be made clear to members of the public?

Thank you for answering the first question. You said what I would have said. The process is entirely open, unless somebody has specifically said that they do not want their response to be made public.

The changes are a direct result of the consultation and the responses that we got from people. One of the questions was how we would raise any form of levy; the new proposal exactly reflects the evidence that we have had from the huge number of responses. We have reflected on that, which is why the proposal is slightly different now.

This is the first time that the committee has undertaken this procedure. A lot of the questions that we asked about Mike Ruskell's proposed bill concerned the same principles. I suspect that it will be important that members of the public reading the Official Report can get a sense of how the process works. We are not testing the principles of the bill at this stage, but they will still get a rigorous testing. The same principles apply to consultation on a member's bill as to consultation on an Executive bill before it is introduced to the Parliament. The committee appointed to test the bill will have to scrutinise the content of the proposals and decide whether the member who is proposing the bill has taken sufficient consideration of the representations made in the consultation. Whichever committee becomes the lead committee will eventually have to make a recommendation to the Parliament on whether the bill's principles are right and to undertake detailed scrutiny, should the principles be accepted.

The process is new for us, but it is appropriate that we have tested those issues with the members in charge of the bills so that people understand what we are doing today. We are not debating with Mike Pringle whether the principles of his bill are right; we are trying to establish whether sufficient consultation has been carried out in line with the Parliament's rules. Our decision will be presented to the Parliament to enable it to determine whether the bill will go to the next stage.

I have a question for Mike Pringle on the initial consultation paper. What kind of spread of organisations did you hope to get? Did you contact organisations or did you wait for them to download your consultation paper and respond?

We sent out 250 consultation papers. NEBU helped in determining who those 250 consultees would be, but we sent papers to almost every organisation that represents industry and business and almost every green organisation. We sent papers to a huge number of people right across the spectrum to ensure that anybody who wanted to respond was able to do so. We also got a large amount of publicity. The consultation paper was on my website and the Liberal Democrat website; it was just everywhere.

My understanding is that 146 responses is about as a high a number of responses as any member's bill has ever had. If the committee reads all the responses to the consultation, it will have an awful lot of reading to do, because some of the responses are extremely detailed and large. I also spent some time with my colleague in the constituency office contacting consultees who had said that they would respond but had not responded and telling them that the consultation was due to end but that they still had time to respond. In fact, even when we got to the end of the consultation period, we encouraged people to respond and to give their views so that we had as wide a spectrum of views as possible, and we received a number of other responses after the closure date.

Are you happy with the detail of the responses that you received? In consultations, people often just send in letters saying that the proposal is a good idea or a rubbish idea, which does not inform the policy development.

Whichever committee becomes the lead committee—I would have thought that it is likely to be this one—will see when it examines the consultation responses that some consultees have made extremely detailed responses. That is the case not only with those who are for the bill, but with those who are against it. Some substantial documents have been submitted, particularly against the proposal, but also in favour of it. There is a lot of reading involved.

I thank members for their questions and comments. Is the committee satisfied with the reasons that Mike Pringle has given for not consulting on his draft proposal?

Members indicated agreement.

I thank Mike Pringle and David Cullum.