Welsh Assembly plans to impose charge for supermarket carrier bags

Ben Webster Environment Editor
Wales is to become the first part of Britain to ban free carrier bags after deciding that efforts by supermarkets to cut waste have proved ineffective.
All shops, market stalls and takeaways in Wales will be obliged from the end of next year to charge up to 15p each for plastic or paper bags.
Jane Davidson, the Welsh Environment Minister, told The Times that the revenue would go to a new independent body, which would spend the money on local environmental projects. She admitted that a small number of people might switch to shops in England, where there are no plans to charge for carrier bags.
She said that tough action was necessary, because many shoppers were failing “to embrace the environmental message”, despite incentives such as loyalty card points for bringing their own bags. Ms Davidson, a Labour member of the Welsh Assembly’s ruling Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition, hopes the ban will embarrass her counterparts in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland into similar action.
Wales is planning to use a little-known clause in last year’s Climate Change Act, which enables devolved governments to outlaw free bags.
Ms Davidson said: “Single-use bags are a legacy of the throwaway society from the 1980s. We want to encourage people to think about what they do. All the other ministers are still signed up to the voluntary agenda. You will see a different message from me.”
Last week The Times revealed that Tesco had published misleading figures giving the impression that it had a met a voluntary target to halve the use of plastic bags in three years. Seven supermarket chains reported last month that the total number of free bags they had issued had fallen by 48 per cent to 450 million a month in the three years to last May.
The figures masked that Marks & Spencer, the only chain to charge for bags, had made much faster progress than its rivals. It cut bag use by 83 per cent after introducing a 5p charge last year. Supermarkets have been lobbying furiously against a ban because they fear that compulsory charging would be the beginning of much tighter packaging restrictions.
Ms Davidson said that banning free bags would encourage a wider shift to a less wasteful society. She was considering a charge of between 5p and 15p, but hinted that she favoured the upper end of the range.
The Republic of Ireland cut the number of bags by 90 per cent — from 328 bags per person per year to 21 — after introducing a 15 cents (13p) charge in 2002. In 2007 it increased the charge to 22 cents after bag use rose to 31 per person.
Jane Milne, environment director of the British Retail Consortium, said that the industry had no deadline for reducing bags below the present level. “We have an aspiration to reduce them by 70 per cent [on 2006 levels], but we haven’t set a date.”
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “All options are on the table, but we don’t think [charging] is right at this stage, particularly in the economic climate.”