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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will make it his policy to place a duty on all local authorities to report on both the (a) amount of waste collected for recycling and (b) proportion of the amount of waste collected for recycling that is recycled; and if he will make a statement.

Local authorities already have statutory duties to arrange for the collection and disposal of household waste in their area. There is a legal requirement under section 4 of The Waste and Emissions Trading Act 2003 to report tonnages of waste they collect and tonnages sent to each disposal facility.

Local authorities report this information via the WasteDataFlow web portal and Defra publishes annual statistics using this data. The latest available annual Household waste recycling rates for England are for 2019/20. Table 3b of the datasets shows household recycling rates, the tonnage of materials recycled and the tonnage of material rejected from recycling streams.