Over the last few months, one of the Ministers in the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has managed to gain more column inches than the subject he is supposed to be promoting. He is in effect the Minister for waste and as with many of the Ministers in the coalition, has made statements that show he has little affinity for those of us that he is supposed to be inspiring. His name is Rupert Ponsonby, the 6th Baron De Mauley who is a Government Minister on the basis of his seat in the House of Lords. A few months ago Rupert came to public attention when publicising a waste strategy. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph Lord De Mauley thinks ‘families should reconsider their buying habits and resist the temptation to spend more money on the latest electronic gadgets, clothes and food that they will not eat, according to Lord de Mauley, the environment minister. Under his plans, consumers will be advised to sell their unwanted possessions on eBay and other auction websites instead of throwing re-usable items away’. One of the challenges for any Government Minister is to offer practical suggestions to the nation as a whole whilst simultaneously indicating an understanding for the impact that these changes will have. Whatever Rupert’s own personal experience in terms of waste prevention, he and the government need to realise that for someone with such a privileged background to be telling people with much lower standards of living to manage on less and repair faulty TVs rather than replace them is not going to achieve the change of behaviour that we all need to achieve in our use of natural resources. However Rupert is not simply offending residents, he is also irritating local councils who are working further down the waste hierarchy. According to this report he has ‘reminded local authorities that combing collections of dry recyclables will not be permissible in all circumstances and that reasonable steps must be taken to ensure that waste streams are kept separate from each other to provide high quality recyclables.’ In essence he is not telling them anything new and they have to deal with one reality that Lord de Mauley has already shown himself to be out of touch with. This is the behaviour of residents, whose willingness to recycle items is partly in proportion to the simplicity of the process involved. Whilst separating items out at home and through the collection process is desirable to take full advantage of the benefits of recycling, it is compromised if the majority of residents concerned are not willing to maintain the discipline concerned. Local Government can always be inspired or provoked to do more, but the residents who they collect waste from need to be won over, and the processes concerned need to be sustainable. As a Minister who has never faced the ballot box, Rupert may not appreciate the challenge faced by Councillors in trying to change local behaviour.

One of the reasons why Rupert Ponsonby may be approaching these issues in a counter intuitive way is revealed through his CV. He spent 30 years as a member of the Territorial Army, an environment where willing conscripts in the Battalion do as they are told by the Lieutenant Colonel (his rank when he retired). Away from his Government and Wikipedia CV, his past is a bit more colourful and included 15 years working with the scrap metal industry which clearly gives him a good understanding of one part of the waste industry and perhaps explains his desire to persuade us all to fix our TVs!

Is it time for a change of role for this Minister, and to bring in someone who understands the demands of running a different sort of waste recycling scheme than the scrap metal yards that Rupert is familiar with? Someone whose idea of reducing household waste is a bit more focused than telling residents to spend less money on clothes and food they won’t eat!