I’m delighted to see the pilot of the bottle deposit scheme in this year’s budget. I think that’s completely excellent, enabling us to understand the number of miles that may need to be travelled to get the containers back to the factory and to understand the process to make sure that it really is sustainable. It can’t come too soon, because David Attenborough has, once again, made a plea to the world to do something about the number of plastics that are ending up in the ocean and killing off the wildlife in parts of the world that we are never going to visit. It is completely deplorable that we’ve been so wasteful of our planet’s resources in allowing this to happen.

I think that the 80 per cent municipal recycling target is ambitious but doable, but it does require a renewed effort by some local authorities. Cardiff, for example, my own local authority, is bouncing along the bottom at 58 per cent and that isn’t good enough. It’s partly an attitude of mind, that it’s not robust enough in pushing forward the education campaign that’s needed with all our citizens, not just those who are already committed to this process. I’ve been campaigning for weeks now to get recycling bins reinstated into a few blocks of flats in my constituency and it simply hasn’t happened. There’s no way that people can be doing the right thing by putting their bags of green waste separately from the residual waste, and then not having an appropriate place to deposit them. If they then end up in the landfill site, then that is a completely hopeless approach, and, obviously, demoralises people. So, that has got to change, and we need to ensure that all our citizens are engaged in this process, and not just those who are most enthusiastic about it.

Similarly, we simply can’t justify throwing away a third of all the food produced in this country. It’s completely grotesque in a world where many, many people are going hungry, both in this country and in other parts of the world. This is absolutely not a sustainable or responsible practice and so we all need to do our bit to ensure that we are not ordering more than we need, that we are using the food that we’ve got in our fridges, and, if not, we need to be ensuring that we’re giving it away to people who can use it more effectively than we can. So, I think the targets are great, but I think that there’s no room for complacency and we need to ensure that all citizens are engaged in this process.