Can I firstly thank the Member for her warm words and joining me in recognising the work that our collection crews have played and the role they played the length and breadth of the country and in communities in our constituencies, not just during the pandemic, but throughout the year as well, and the role that they play there? 

The Member asked some questions around the challenge of fly-tipping in our communities, and I absolutely agree with her that this is—we should be clear—absolutely unacceptable anti-social behaviour, and it is not and will not be tolerated. We're working closely with our local authority partners to look at the work we can do around enforcement, but also the Member raises important points around the role of raising education. 

She talks about access to facilities. Now, within my statement and within our 'Beyond Recycling' consultation, we've invested £1 billion in the last 20 years in infrastructure—regional infrastructure and infrastructure that means we're able to deal with our recycling and reprocess it. But what we want to do is take that further, and invest in that community infrastructure, so people are able to access facilities on their doorstep without having to drive out of town, to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing, but also that brings benefits for local towns and communities as well, whether that be through creating hubs for repair and reuse, or coupling them with zero-waste shops. And that's why I hope the funding that we've announced recently will help contribute, alongside the recent tranche of circular economy funding for public bodies and organisations that town and community councils are also able to bid for on this occasion. So, we could see more projects in towns and communities across the country, which I hope, then, others can see and then we can spread them at scale right across the nation.

The Member raises—this is the point around incineration. Let's be clear: our aim is to be a zero-waste nation with a more circular economy that keeps resources in use and avoids waste in the first place. We need to get to the position we want to get to, but, in the interim, we need a way to deal effectively with our non-recyclable waste in a way that prevents if from polluting the environment or sees the problem being exported elsewhere. And we have the facilities that can use this waste to recover energy, and heat provides an important transitional way of dealing with waste in line with the waste hierarchy. But within the 'Beyond Recycling consultation we talked about taking full responsibility on waste, and that's from grass roots to Government and everything in between, and the document was clear on incineration that it's a transitional measure and our long-term plan is to keep resources for use for as long as is possible and avoid waste being burned or buried.