London Local Authorities Shopping Bags Bill: Michael Grimes, partner, Eversheds

Author information: Michael Grimes is a partner at international law firm Eversheds. Michael heads a team providing commercial support for public and private partnerships, including joint ventures, PFI and associated projects and private sector outsourcing. The firm's waste clients manage 20 per cent of England's total household waste. Eversheds' Projects and Infrastructure Finance team is a leading adviser to local authorities addressing the problems and challenges of managing municipal waste.

The eagerly anticipated London Local Authorities Shopping Bags Bill was published on December 5th.

Following a widespread consultation by London Councils, if the Bill successfully passes a preliminary stage, it will be introduced in Parliament this month.

The Bill provides for a prohibition on retailers supplying shopping bags to customers across the whole of London apart from the borough of Hounslow.

Proposal

 It is proposed that an outright ban will cover all shopping bags apart from certain exemptions such as small bags used to contain unpackaged food for consumption, bags already sealed to package goods before being offered for sale, bags sold for use away from the premises and bags designed for the disposal of waste (i.e. bin bags).

The Bill proposes to give London Councils the flexibility to add or remove any category of bag from the list of exemptions and reduce the dimensions of a small bag, which is currently defined as 300mm by 300mm.

The Bill proposes penalty charges in accordance with the London Local Authority's Act 2007 for not complying with the prohibition. Indeed, the Bill provides powers to authorised council officers to enforce the Bill and investigate suspicions of retailers supplying bags to customers. It will also be an offence to obstruct or delay an officer exercising these powers under the Bill.

An outright ban on shopping bags is a bold move by London Councils. Rather than follow the route of a levy on plastic bags, as adopted by Ireland, London Councils has clearly been buoyed by the results of its public consultation. Even though the consultation offered various options, such as no action at all, small charges on bags to be paid by retailers or consumers and restricting the levy to major retailers only, nearly 60 per cent of Londoners polled supported a ban.

Effectiveness

Should the Bill become an Act and come into force undiluted this year, it remains to be seen how effective and popular any such ban will be. Although council officers have been given wide enforcement powers, including warrants to search premises for evidence of supplying plastic bags, it seems far fetched to imagine officers raiding premises and entering them by force in search of such benign contraband.

Smaller businesses such as newsagents and convenience stores will suffer the most from this ban on bags. Hopefully, it will not result in people only shopping at major supermarkets where they can more easily take their ‘bag for life' with them to purchase their weekly goods or even cause consumers to only purchase what they can carry without a bag from smaller retailers.

This begs the question: will smaller retailers become tempted to ignore the ban if it has detrimental effects on their sales? Without a logo such as Tesco, Sainsburys, Primark or Gucci on a bag, it will also be hard to prove where a bag came from. As well as supermarkets, this ban will affect clothes and electricals shops. Are carboard boxes with handles carrying a hi-fi also a ‘bag'?

Moreover, what seems to many to be a positive environmental step has been criticised by many industry bodies. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) and the Waste Resources Action Programme (supported by DEFRA funding) oppose a plastic bag levy, let alone an outright ban. They question the environmental benefits and prefer to champion other ways of reducing the volume of plastic bags used by consumers by encouraging reusing durable bags, using less material, incorporating more recycled content, and promoting the recycling of all carrier bags.

Opponents of a ban on plastic bags, such as the Carrier Bag Consortium (CBC), also point to the Irish experience in which, although the use of plastic bags decreased, people got around the ban by using other bags such as paper bags and bin bags outside of the exemption.

The CBC argue that paper bags use more energy in production than plastic bags and release methane when degrading in landfill. It should be noted that London has adopted a wider definition of shopping bag than the Irish but it is difficult to predict what other forms of carrier the public will use to transport goods to circumnavigate the ban and what effect on the environment this will have.