5. Will the Cabinet Secretary provide an update on the implementation of the landfill disposals tax? OAQ51740

I thank the Member for the question. Agreement has been reached with the UK Government that landfill disposals tax will go live on 1 April this year. A number of landfill sites have already applied to register with the Welsh Revenue Authority, and feedback on the registration process and the guidance produced by the authority has been positive.

Thank you for that answer. There does seem to be a real opportunity here to use this as a really good scheme that will hopefully go some way to offsetting some of the potential negative impacts on communities that live within a five-mile radius of landfill sites. But there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of information available beyond the fact that the WCVA, the Welsh Council for Voluntary Action, will be administering it. So, is it your intention, or the intention of the WCVA, to let communities and organisations know how they can actually first of all understand the scheme and then apply for any assistance that those communities can benefit from, in accordance with this landfill tax?

Can I thank the Member for drawing attention for the communities scheme in the landfill disposals tax? It is a very important part of the way we are doing things in Wales, and members of the Finance Committee took a particularly keen interest in it. The fact that we have a five-mile zone that now includes waste transfer stations, as well as landfill sites, was one of the changes that was made to the scheme. Our colleague Mike Hedges was particularly influential in advocating that, and Joyce Watson will be particularly glad, I know, to know that that means that there are now 16 waste transfer stations in her region, where communities will be able to benefit from the scheme who previously had no benefit from it at all. The WCVA has been selected as the body that will oversee the scheme. We expect the first applications to it to come in in the late spring of this year, and there will be a period between now and then in which a fresh burst of publicity about the scheme and the three essential purposes for which it is available are drawn to the attention of groups that might wish to make such an application. 

Cabinet Secretary, what are the chances that the rates will actually diverge between Wales and England? Or, do you feel that the problem of the border is always going to be insuperable in terms of having a more nuanced and specific policy in Wales to meet our own needs?

Well, David Melding is absolutely right that the border is a very significant issue in landfill disposals tax. Waste tourism, which some of us became familiar with during the passage of the Bill, is a genuine risk, and it is why I said, in setting rates and bands for this tax, that we would not diverge from rates and bands across our border for at least the first two years. We have already diverged, however, in setting a 150 per cent band for unauthorised disposals, and that doesn't exist across our border. So, there is already some—and I think very useful—differentiation here. We will look to see the way in which the tax operates over the first two years of its life because we will now, for the very first time, have precise evidence about the way that landfill disposal occurs in Wales. There will then be an opportunity to see whether some purposeful divergence is possible. I've said all the way along, and I'll say it again: I'm not a believer in divergence for the sake of it. If it suits us and does things in a better way for us in Wales, we will, but we will wait to have the evidence before we make such a decision.