Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department plans to publish a plan to transition to the packaging extended producer responsibility scheme; and whether she plans to bring forward legislative proposals to mandate the scheme in law.

The Packaging Waste (Data Reporting) (England) Regulations 2023 were debated in the House of Commons on 2 February 2023 and are due to come into force on the 28 February 2023. Similar regulations will be introduced in parallel in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. These regulations will require producers to collect and report data on the packaging they supply. We are not planning to publish a transition plan at this stage, but we have published guidance and an obligation checker to help obligated producers to prepare for pEPR on the gov.uk website, including outlining the data producers will need to start collecting from March and report from October 2023. This guidance will be continually updated with more detailed information.

My Department’s intention is that the regulations to introduce Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging (pEPR) will be introduced at the end of 2023. These regulations will reflect the policy set out in the Government response to the 2021 consultation, which was published in March 2022.