Philip Davies: The nanny state gets carried away over plastic bags

As with so many issues, this policy has the EU’s fingerprints all over it. The UK Government was among those that opposed the idea of a mandatory charge across all EU states, yet the European Commission now requires member states to reduce the consumption of plastic carrier bags.

This ill-thought-out policy of charging 5p per bag hinges on the premise that carrier bags are single-use items and fails to recognise that plastic carrier bags are rarely used just once. Even if they are not reused as a carrier bag per se, they are often used as bin-liners in many homes or to remove other waste.

While carrier bags themselves account for less than two per cent of household waste, their use as a substitution for more resource-intensive bags such as bin liners means that the environmental aims of the policy are less likely to be achieved.

This charge has come about because these bags are plastic. However, this policy only targets the plastic in carrier bags and completely disregards the frequent use of plastic as a packaging material.

Indeed, what is to stop the person who has just bought the 5p plastic bag from tossing aside the plastic bottle they’ve also just bought? Not much really… and certainly not the 5p.

According to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, this “shopping tax” is estimated to add approximately £1.5bn to the cost of living for English families over the next decade. This comprises of £1.1bn for the 5p charge, £348m for substitute bags for life and bin liners, £70m of additional VAT and £5m of taxpayer enforcement. Ultimately that is potentially £67 per household of additional unnecessary cost.

I believe it is a completely nonsensical policy to implement when we should be trying to bring down the cost of living, not increasing it.

Major supermarkets, such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s, have already confirmed that they will charge a flat rate of 40p for deliveries if the customer wants their items pre-packed in bags. This is regardless of how large or small the delivery is and would apply even if the customer only uses one or two bags.

Not only are families facing this additional blow, but there is potential for these charges to increase over time, as has happened in Ireland. As the first country in the world to introduce a plastic bag charge, the Republic of Ireland introduced a levy at the rate of 15 cents (13p) per bag back in 2002, which rose to 22 cents, or 18p, in 2007. Wales and Northern Ireland introduced a 5p levy on single use carrier bags in 2011 and 2013 respectively, with the Scottish Government following suit in 2014. Also, although the charge does not yet apply to businesses employing fewer than 250 individuals, it is quite likely that this will be extended at some point in the future. As with so many things, this could just be the very thin end of the wedge.

When I brought the issue up in Parliament recently, the Leader of the House mentioned “the very real impact on our environment of the number of disposable plastic bags that get into our ecosystem”. However do we really think that the answer to this problem is to charge for carrier bags? Surely the issue is preventing these bags from getting into the ecosystem in the first place?

If littering or ineffective disposal is causing the bags to be a problem, then presumably we need to be looking for a solution to those issues rather than unnecessarily increasing household costs.

The new charge will also not apply to paper bags but ironically the Environmental Audit Select Committee concluded that “paper bags can have a greater emissions impact than plastic bags”.

If the sole aim is to reduce the use of plastic bags I believe a more proportionate and effective way to do so is through voluntary efforts. Even simply asking the customer whether they would like a plastic bag before giving them one is a convenient and efficient way of trying to control the number of bags that are used. Encouraging customers to reuse their bags or to use long-life bags is another way of unobtrusively getting the desired effect.

There is also nothing to stop individual shops charging for bags if they want to – as some do. According to the Association of Convenience Stores Local Shops, 16 per cent of independent convenience stores do currently charge for plastic carrier bags and I believe all businesses should have the freedom to choose what is right for them and their customers.

Voluntary efforts resulted in a 48 per cent reduction in plastic bag use between 2006 and 2009 and I think this clearly shows that punitive, top-down, nanny-state policies such as this are, as always, completely unnecessary.

Philip Davies is the Conservative MP for Shipley.