I'd like to welcome the Minister to her new role and her statement. Minister, I do have reservations about these new proposed regulations, and UKIP will be voting against them today. As you say, we do have a growing problem with fly-tipping, and we believe that the best approach is to make it as easy as possible for everyone—residents and commercial operators—to use council tips to dispose of material, which is then recycled. We know that many unscrupulous operators avoid legal means of disposing of rubbish and do resort to the appalling practice of fly-tipping, which disfigures the environment. We have to do what we can to restrict this practice, but I'm not sure that bringing in another regulation when the practice is already illegal will actually make things any better.

There seems to me to be a lot of overly bureaucratic rules over who can use council tips, when what we should be doing is making it easier for everyone to use these facilities—that is, if the aim is to reduce waste and increase recycling. But we do seem to get confused over this because of local councils also having a commercial imperative to increase their revenue by charging whoever they can for the use of recycling facilities. This doesn't just affect commercial operators. It also affects residents, who are now charged in many council areas for the collection of bulky items, where, a few years ago, these collections could be arranged free of charge.

I think, if we are serious about increasing recycling, we have to get away from the idea of people being charged or having to show proof of address details or being restricted to so many visits to the tip in a calendar year, all of which are now restrictions placed by most councils on people using recycling depots. If we really want more material recycled, we are better off reducing these petty restrictions so that more people can recycle more material at council-run facilities. So, we think that less regulation is actually better in terms of reducing fly-tipping, and for those reasons we oppose the new regulations today. Diolch yn fawr.