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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps is he taking to ensure effective oversight of the plastic bag charge to ensure that proceeds are allocated to environmental causes.

Since 5 October 2015, large retailers (250 or more employees) in England have been required by law to charge 5p for all single use plastic carrier bags. The charge was increased from 5p to 10p and extended to all retailers from 21 May 2021. Large retailers are also required by law to report certain information to Defra every year including what they did with the proceeds from the charge.

While it is strongly encouraged that the net proceeds from the charge should be donated to good causes, especially environmental ones, this is not a legal requirement. Therefore, if retailers do choose to donate to charity, any decisions about this will be personal each individual business. Since the introduction of the charge in 2015, retailers that have reported their proceeds to us have donated nearly £190 million to their chosen good causes.

In the last reporting year of 2020 to 2021, 38% of retailers who reported gave additional information on how they chose to donate their proceeds from the carrier bag charge. These retailers donated a total of £10.9 million to good causes. Out of the total amount donated by retailers to good causes:

• £0.1 million (1%) went to health, environment and heritage
• £0.3 million (3%) went to charity or volunteering sectors
• £3.0 million (27%) went to causes just chosen by customers or staff
• £7.5 million (69%) went to a combination of more than one good cause (relating to education, arts, heritage, sports, environment, health, charity or volunteering sectors and causes chosen by customers or staff)

It is important to note that this data cannot be directly compared with that of previous years, due to unique circumstances related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The legal obligation for retailers to charge for single use plastic carrier bags supplied with online grocery deliveries was removed from 21 March 2020 to 21 September 2020, and during this exemption period the reporting requirement for large retailers was also removed.

The information is available on the most recent publication Single-use plastic carrier bags charge: data for England 2020 to 2021 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk), which summarises all data collected by Defra for the reporting year from 7 April 2020 to 6 April 2021, including the donation information. We have previously published summaries for earlier years and published the full datasets on data.gov.uk, this includes all reporting details provided by each retailer.