When sugar was not a public enemy

The First World War saw draconian restrictions applied to food. It was shock to the sweet-toothed nation when teacakes were banned in 1917.

 

Sugar was not viewed as a bad thing in Britain a hundred years ago. Essential to tea (the national beverage) and for making plain food palatable, it was regarded as a vital, energy-providing foodstuff.

 

Vitamins were newly-discovered, so it was unsure how they affected health. Undue stress was therefore placed on calories in dietary calculations. The poorest Britons had restricted access to fresh milk and often gave their infants sugar-rich condensed milk instead. It's unsurprising that a fifth of children died before their first birthday.

 

If anything, the First War, which Britain entered in August 1914, made the nation's sweet tooth even sweeter. Sweets would not be rationed (unlike in the Second World War) and chocolate and biscuits were regularly sent to the Tommies at the front, in an attempt to raise their morale.

 

It was apparent from the start of the war that national supplies of three vital commodities – bread, meat and sugar – would need to be carefully managed. The man placed in charge of the 'big three' was the nation's first food minister, Lord Devonport, who had made a fortune from a national grocery chain. He introduced a voluntary rationing scheme in February 1917.

 

As food controller, he was able to use secondary legislation annexed to the wide-ranging Defence of the Realm Act (which banned bonfires, kite flying and whistling for taxes) to push government intervention into unprecedented areas, through food control orders. A maximum quota was imposed for beer production and food hoarding was made a criminal offence, with widely drawn search powers granted by the food controller. 

 

To conserve vital national supplies rules were imposed in 1917 that banned pastries, crumpets and teacakes (cakes, buns and biscuits were still allowed), specified maximum quantities of flour in bread and diverted wheat, rice and rye flour for human consumption. Evening meals of more than three courses were prohibited – the rules explained that plain cheese was not regarded as a course. Bread had to be sold stale, so that it could be sliced more thinly.

 

Enter the jam police

 

Jam makers, including branches of the newly-formed Women’s Institute, could apply for additional supplies of sugar. An intriguing note attached to the sugar order explained that rhubarb, although a 'soft fruit', would not justify an application for 'a large amount of sugar' for the purpose of jam-making. No sugar was allowed for apple and marrow jam.

 

The note added, “all sugar found to have been obtained by misrepresentation should be returned to the grocer through which the applicant obtained it”, pending instructions from the Royal Sugar Commission.

 

This intrusion into jam-making must have seemed a curious addition to the duties of local authority sanitary inspectors, who were tasked to enforce a growing list of food orders, especially as their manpower had been drastically depleted by the war. They were advised to use discretion but to show no leniency to those who wilfully broke the law.

 

Penalties for breaking the rules could be severe. In 1917, Croydon magistrates fined a Mitcham grocer £40 (more than £3,000 today) for selling butter at excessive prices. Breaches of the following year's rationing order, such as misappropriating ration books, could attract custodial sentences.

 

Good-bye Lord Devonport

 

Lord Devonport was widely seen to be ineffectual and too close to food producers’ interests to do his job rigorously. Worse for him, queues in shops were getting longer and prices were increasing. He was forced by public pressure, to resign. 

 

In July 1917, prime minister Lloyd George chose Lord Rhondda, a mining magnate from South Wales, to develop a more rigorous and well-enforced food system. Lord Rhondda would work to wider terms of reference than his predecessor. He was determined to conserve supplies and distribute them as equally as possible between rich and poor and to keep prices down.

 

Rhondda directed local authorities to set up food committees, each with a minimum of 12 members, to be in charge of setting prices, implementing food control orders and running local economy campaigns. Bradford's food committee first met in August 1917. Over the following months, it set up sub-committees for sugar, meet, flour, bread, potatoes and milk. Two officers were appointed to make sure that the law was being followed. Bradford was allocated a budget of £265 to encourage people to eat less.

 

Sugar was the first commodity to be compulsorily rationed. From January 1918, householder had to produce sugar cards at registered retailers to obtain their weekly allowance. One step ahead of still-growing queues, ration books were issued to all households in July 1918, adding meat, milk, butter, cheese and margarine.

 

The Ministry of Food was dissolved in 1921. It is a credit to Lord Rhondda that his carefully thought-out scheme, balancing consent and coercion, had served its purpose – although sometimes only just. In the Second World War, rationing was introduced in January 1940, following a template that had already been set.

 

 

How we didn’t starve in the First World War

In a striking parallel to Brexit, the outbreak of the First World War led to acute food shortages in the UK.

 

The country was caught off guard in August 1914 by a war that was not supposed to happen. The British Expeditionary Force was dispatched to France. By the autumn it was bogged down in the killing felds of the first Battle of Ypres.

 

It was now clear that millions of servicemen and civilians would have to be fed. Yet the country was ill-equipped to do so. The national diet was simpler then – its staples were meat, white bread, vegetables (especially potatoes), jam and tea. But the country relied heavily on tariff-free imports (80 per cent of wheat, 40 per cent of meat and almost sugar were imported).

 

Over the next two years, the lack of food security became increasingly acute. Imports were restricted and prices rose sharply. From March 2016, national conscription robbed agriculture of its most productive labour force. Munitions factories were also diverting labour and materials from agricultural machinery.

 

Although the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914 had anticipated the government requisitioning land and Royal Commissions on sugar and wheat had been set up, the state was slow to adopt wide-ranging national powers.

 

By 1917, the poor harvest of the previous autumn and the escalation of German u-boat attacks made emergency measures vital. In December, the new prime minister, David Lloyd George created a Ministry of Food Control. The first minster or ‘food controller’, a self-made grocery magnate, Lord Devenport, was ineffectual and ridiculed in the press. He was replaced in July by a newly-enobled Welsh colliery millionaire, Lord Rhondda. Lord Rhondda stepped up price controls for essential foodstuffs (a measure that had been resisted by his predecessor) through ‘food orders’ imposed by local committees, which also advised on food economies.

 

The food controller allocated grain to millers and corn merchants, through the wheat commission, set prices, reduced the wheat flour content of the national loaf and urged the country to ‘eat less bread’. Householders could receive badges and certificate proving their commitment to the cause. The food controller appointed a director of milk supplies, campaigner Wilfred Buckley, who set prices, ensuring that they were lower for mothers and children.

 

Voluntary rationing

 

Voluntary rationing was introduced in February 1917, setting guidelines for the consumption of bread, meat and sugar (the new diet was publicly adopted by King George and Queen Mary).

 

With wheat supplies down to a few weeks, working with the Board of Agriculture (later to become MAFF), Lord Rhondda ordered pastureland to be ploughed up for arable production and for munitions factories to turn out tractors.

 

The crisis was changing the cultural landscape. The feeding of stray dogs was forbidden, even the flower beds of Buckingham Palace were dug over for vegetables. Popular magazines like The Bystander and companies like Oxo published recipes for frugal but tasty meals.

 

At the vanguard of ‘doing its bit’ the newly-formed Women’s Institute found an important role teaching housewives how to substitute sugar in jam and wheat flour in bread for less scarce ingredients. And the Women’s Land Army (quarter of million strong by 1918) joined prisoners of war to weed, till, plough and reap the farms of Britain, wearing special armbands.

 

In May 1917, Queen Mary opened Britain’s first ‘national kitchen’ in Westminster Bridge Road. State-funded and staffed by female volunteers, the kitchens served meat-based meals for as little as 6d (£1 today). The food ministry said that they were not be regarded as, ‘soup kitchens’ but places where ‘ordinary people could sit down together at long canteen tables for a cheap meal.’ Some were so busy that there was actually nowhere to sit. By 1918, there were more than 600 national kitchens across the country.

 

By the final year of the war, thanks to blockades and submarine attacks, German people were dying of starvation. But, somehow, thanks to the stepping up of home production and unprecedented interventions in food quality, composition and price, Britain had stayed one step ahead of catastrophe.

 

Compulsory rationing was not implemented until 1918. It began, in January, with sugar (Britain had created a domestic sugar industry from scratch since 1914). By April, meat, bread, butter and margarine had been added to the scheme, which was to be repeated in World War Two. All households, including, in theory, the Royal Family, received ration books and had to register with a local butcher and grocer.

 

Ironically, rationing improved the nation’s health. Worn out by his arduous campaign, Lord Rhondda died prematurely, in July 1918, four months before the armistice. In the next war, his famous and equally successful successor as food minister, Lord Woolton, would give his name to the ‘Woolton pie’.

 

Mess, muddle and tribalism – English local government

 

A proposal for an enlarged greater London, which would take in the surrounding counties, should re-open a debate on local government reform. But it probably won’t.

 

The London Society, according to its website, was founded in 1912, by a group of eminent people who were concerned about the lack of planning in the capital. 

 

They included architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Beresford Pite, Socialist early town planner and architect, Raymond Unwin, and painter and designer Frank Brangwy. They met, no doubt, in a wood-panelled room in St James’s, fugged with cigar smoke, to discuss infrastructure-related issues of the day, including, housing, roads, railways and the barely feasible and dangerous idea of a channel tunnel – one had been started in 1882 but abandoned, for fear that it would provide an invasion route.

 

It is highly probable  that these top-hatted bastions of Edwardian society (were any women included, I wonder?) would also have discussed the highly topical issue of the governance of the capital city.

 

With the arrival of county councils in 1888, more or less the whole country, including Ireland, was covered by elected local government, much to the disgust of author and designer William Morris, a founder member of the Socialist League, who advocated revolution, not gradualist reform. Urban and rural districts had been set up 1894.

 

The London County Council took over, from1890, the responsibilities of the London's Metropolitan Board of Works. In 1899, London's parish vestries and local boards of works were replaced by borough councils. London’s democratically-elected local authority was an extraordinary creation of the Victorian laissez-faire, but reformist, era of Disraeli and Gladstone. By the early twentieth century, it was lighting and paving the streets, providing gas and water supplies, constructing sewers, clearing slums, building flats and houses and running tram systems, libraries, art galleries and public baths.

 

In the 1890s, 'Progressives' (who were neither Liberal nor Conservative) were elected to prominent positions on the LCC, including the remarkable John Burns, a former docker, who went on to become an independent Labour MP and president of the Local Government Board. The Progressives were influenced by the Fabianism of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and by the branch of Socialism that accommodated municipal reform.

 

Councils acquired powers to build houses through Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890. The LCC duly established a housing of the working classes branch, in its architects' department, whose work was influenced, stylistically, by the arts and crafts movement. It built some beautiful housing estates, not for the poorest but for waged artisans – for example, Old Oak Estate in Hammersmith and Totterdown Fields in Tooting. You can still see them today.

 

Lord Salisbury, who had been Conservative prime minister when the LCC was formed came to regret his creation. He said of the LCC, in 1894, "It is the place where collectivist and socialistic experiments are tried. It is the place where a new revolutionary spirit finds its instruments and collects its arms". It was for similar reasons that Margaret Thatcher summarily abolished the LCC’s successor, the Greater London Council, in 1987.

 

Frankenstein’s monster

 

The London Society’s concept, launched for discussion, of a new Greater London, enlarged to include all of the surrounding counties, including, Essex, Kent, East and West Sussex and Buckinghamshire would not be Greater London at all. In effect, this Frankenstein’s monster, would be a de facto south-east England region. The concept of regions run by mayors with executive powers seems weird to me. It would be like reverting to Saxon times, when the country was divided into parcels of land led by warring chieftains.

 

We’ve been here before. The idea of splitting England into regions, each with elected assemblies, was tried by Labour in 2004. it failed at the first hurdle when the north-east voted no, in a ballot that Labour had complacently expected to be a shoe-in. In some ways, that was an early expression of the disaffection of the ‘red wall’. The right-on, lifestyle-based politics of New Labour never took root in the north-east, even though Tony Blair’s constituency was in County Durham.

 

Don’t get me wrong. Personally, I think that we should adopt English regions, but that their governance should be a list-based PR system, as used to elect the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland assemblies – the radical and welcome innovation of New Labour in 1997.

 

Counties and districts would be scrapped. Each region would be made up of unitary authorities, with consistent powers and responsibilities. The danger, under this model, is that south-east would be home of the national capital and by far the wealthiest region. So why not move the national capital to Birmingham, with a brand new, state-of-the-art circular chamber? For the majority of MPs that would be quite convenient.

 

Don’t worry, it will never happen. France, Germany and Spain managed to create rational tiers of regional and local government which work, with little fuss. Here, when one government gets in, it scraps the reforms of the previous one and adopts changes which are blatant gerrymandering, as in the last great local government re-organisaton of 1972, masterminded by Conservative environment secretary, Peter Walker.

 

Walker’s reforms created the beginnings of the dog's dinner that we have now – a mish-mash of unitary authorities, counties and districts, with separate and sometimes overlapping responsibilities, with combined city regions, performing some strategic functions, but not uniformly, layered on top of them.

 

This weird lash-up has nothing to do with devolution or localism, despite what Westminster politicians say – it's rule from the centre by proxy. It’s therefore a solution that can survive changes of government. The current status quo kind of works, albeit in a ramshackle, round-the-houses sort of way and it creates lots of dramas, like our national football team, as it lurches from tournament to tournament. The English seem to like that way of doing things. How else can you explain Boris Johnson?

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

On poor housing and what is a profession

A series of tragedies have placed a spotlight on the specialised skills required of those who manage social housing. But what does it mean to be a ‘professional’?

The Grenfell fire of June 2017, which killed 72 west London residents, and the tragic death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in a housing association home in Rochdale in 2020 have led to a much-needed debate on the knowledge requirements and ethical standards that should be required of social housing managers.

The Grenfell residents lost their lives because their persistent and well-justified fire safety concerns were ignored by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO). Awaab’s father had complained to Rochdale Boroughwide Housing about the damp and mould that infested his house three years before his son died. He was told to paint over it. And we should not forget the six victims of the wholly preventable Lakanhal House tower block fire, in 2009, whose landlord was Southwark Council.

The Social Housing Regulation Bill, tabled last year, will restore powers to the Regulator of Social Housing to enforce standards that had been weakened in 2010 by then housing minister, Grant Shapps. The bill has been consistently attacked by housing campaign, Grenfell United, as lacking in teeth. It was only a coroner’s damning verdict on Awaab’s death from a severe respiratory condition, published last November, that impelled housing secretary Michael Gove to introduce an amendment that has been called ‘Awaab’s law’. The coroner, Joanne Kearsley, warned that there is risk of future deaths occurring, unless action is taken.

The amendment will require a foundation degree, or level 5 qualification, for senior housing executives and a level 4 qualification for housing managers. It’s estimated that this will require 25,000 housing staff to go back to college, which represents a milestone for social housing management.

This positive move, which has been described as the biggest reform to professional standards in social housing’s history, is welcome, but it only goes half-way. It’s interesting here to compare the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH), as ‘professional’ bodies. Both have their roots in Victorian legislation. The forerunners of both had instituted their own systems examinations, administered by boards, by the early twentieth century. But that doesn’t make you a ‘true’ profession. Is estate agency a profession? Or journalism?

‘True’ professions

Long-established and acknowledged professions, such as the law, medicine and accountancy, require a body of knowledge and training and, also, occupational roles that are only available to individuals who are members of their professional body. In the UK the designation ‘chartered’ is regarded as benchmark of professionalism. An organisation can only confer that title on a practitioner if it has been granted a royal charter, placing it under the jurisdiction of the Privy Council.

The wheels of officialdom turn slowly. Neither the CIH nor the CIEH gained their royal charters until the 1980s and it was a further decade before the CIEH offered chartered status to its members.

Members of its precursor, the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association, had been discussing the desirability of professional recognition virtually since the beginning of the association, in 1883. In November 1912, a reader, JC Dawes, wrote to the Sanitary Journal calling for professional status for practitioners of ‘sanitary science’. The journal’s editor, HH Spears, responded, somewhat sarcastically: “It will be very useful for the public health worker of the future to know that they are in the vanguard of science, when they are fumigating a room with fire and sulphur, or spraying disinfectant, when removing fever patients to hospital, or working a smoke machine to test drains.”

Spears continued: “All talk about science is so much flapdoodle when applied to the sanitary inspector. However great a scientist he (sic) becomes, he will still be the eyes and nose of his superior officer.” Spears was acknowledging a structural issue that was to impede the professionalisation of environmental health until the 1970s. Legally, sanitary inspectors worked “under the direction” of medical officers of health, who were medically qualified and enjoyed superior salaries and legal status and security of tenure.

Link was broken

The First World War, in which many sanitary inspectors worked for the Royal Army Medical Corps, did not change this situation, nor did the creation of a health ministry in 1919. The link was finally broken in 1974, when medical officers of health transferred to a new employer, the NHS. But newly-christened and comprehensive environmental health services were shattered by severe cuts to public spending caused by oil crisis of the mid-1970s. Arguably, they have never recovered.

Housing managers, too, worked predominantly in local government for most of the twentieth century. While they were never managed by a professional cadre of superior status, working for local government has never attracted the cachet enjoyed by those who practice the law or medicine, even though a commonality is the fundamental and life-saving nature of these occupations.

For housing this may have contributed to the deaths of the Grenfell residents and Awaab Ishak, who was born in a damp and mould-infested house and who never had a chance to be healthy. Members of professions have clout – they are respected and listened to. If they fail in their duties, they are demoted to civilian status, at a huge cost to salary and reputation. The well-paid managers of the Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) and the CEO of Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, who has since been dismissed, did not risk shame and stigma if they ignored the repeated pleas to be noticed of those lives they were responsible for.

I said earlier that that the requirement for the training of housing managers only goes half-way to what is required. Why? The law stipulates qualifications for housing managers, but it won’t require registration with a professional body, as is the case for solicitors or medical professionals, who can be struck off or suspended for misconduct. Neither housing nor environmental health, which are both now practised in all sectors, will enjoy true professional status until this step is reached.

It may never happen. The reasons are embedded in social attitudes as much as legislation. Housing and environmental health have their professional roots in local government which has been battered by cuts for decades. Neither body has a swanky set of oak-panelled rooms in Westminster – a repository of its intellectual capital and iconic objects.

And neither has a library. The CIEH disposed of its once-cherished library in 2017. Such matters may seem trivial. But tradition and a sense of shared history are actually essential to any profession. For an organisation whose members are vital to public health, you lose them at your peril.

This blog is posted on the RHE Global website

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

Photo: Armley, Wikimedia Commons, John Casewell

Missing eucalyptus

They've cut down the giant eucalyptus tree in my neighbour's garden. A familiar piece of the sky has disappeared. I'm going to miss that tree. I has been my constant companion for the past 23 years and has featured in several poems - mainly because I was generally day dreaming while looking out of the window of my bedrom, where I sometmes write. When it was struck by the evening sun, it was a beautiful haze of shimmering gold and silvery green and it was often a stopping off place for the flock of chattering parakeets that hangs out in the local cemetery. They would rest in the tree on their noisy foraging expedions. The guys who cut it down said they had seen a lot bigger ones. I told them about the wood pidgeon, now homeless, that used to spend most of its time in this improbably tall and handsome specimin of Eucalyptus gunnii. They very kindly cut a section through the trunk as a memento for me – to use as a cheeseboard, they suggested. Well, it's something. Then they drove away in their van. Just another job which they had efficiently and safely performed like removing a tooth. I'll miss my old friend. ‘Count the rings,’ they said. I reckon that there are between forty and fifty – one for each year. The section of trunk still has the damp sappy smell of the spirit that lived in it and will live on in my memory

The sound of broken promises

 

The failure to achieve UK-wide reform of waste and recycling services is a case study in back-sliding, incompetence and political amnesia.

Hear that silence? It’s the sound of the resources and waste strategy, which should have begun this year, not being implemented. What resources and waste strategy, you ask? Well, let’s go back to 2018, when Michael Gove was a bright-eyed, fresh-faced Defra secretary. Green issues were higher up the national agenda. Theresa May, as prime minister, had promised to “leave the environment in a better state than we found it”

Gove is a details person. The resources and waste strategy that he shepherded into being (Wales and Scotland had already implemented zero waste policies) was a well-thought-through plan to reform waste collection and recycling services in England. It had three main elements. Firstly, consistent collection would mean that all councils would recycle the same materials in the same way – glass of any colour, plastic pots, tubs and trays, paper and card, metal, including aluminium foil, green waste and food waste.

Secondly, under a more radical change called extended producer responsibility (EPR) the producers of the packaging that we generally throw away with little thought would pay for its collection and treatment by councils, rather than council taxes and government grants – a sum estimated nationally at £2.7bn. Under a ‘modulated’ system, they would pay lower fees for their packaging if it was easy to recycle. In 2022, business waste and litter, in England, were excluded from EPR.

Begun in Germany in the early 1990s, EPR is a brilliant idea. It gives brand holders – think Coca Cola, MacDonalds, Unilever – a fantastic incentive to wrap up their often extravagantly-packaged goodies with fewer materials and more recycled content, leading to reduced carbon emissions and less plastic being burned or landfilled and ending up in fishes’ stomachs.

A strand of the EU’s Green Deal, EPR promotes the waste hierarchy – reduce, re-use, recycle – and circular economies, in which fewer resources will need to be dug out of the ground, to make new things. The classic example of a circular economy for waste, is aluminium. It’s easy to melt down and re-use. If we recycle all of our drinks cans (which we are actually close to doing in the UK) we will need to mine and transport far less bauxite.

Brand holders and EPR

Large brand holders are surprisingly agnostic about the concept. In many cases, they are in favour. EPR reduces countries’ tax burdens and helps to save the planet. They can hardly oppose it. The idea is eventually going to catch on everywhere.

The third main element to the resources and waste strategy is a deposit return scheme (DRS). It will mean that consumers will be paid back a deposit, estimated at 20p, for each glass or plastic bottle or drinks can that they return. Again, it’s a great idea that is proving highly effective in increasing recycling rates in Scandinavia and parts of Germany. Revenue raised helps to pay for further collection and recycling infrastructure – a circle within a circle.

The strategy seems too good to be true, doesn’t it – the UK becoming an environmentally-responsible country well set on the path to net zero. Well, it is too good to be true. We have had four Defra secretaries since Michael Gove in 2018. One of them, Ranil Jayawardena, lasted for less than two months.

With each secretary, the resources and waste strategy has slipped further into the realms of impossibility – think Kate Winslet in Titanic gradually losing her grip on Leonardo DiCaprio, as he slides into the icy water of the Atlantic. In the war-ravaged context of 2023, it is becoming a chimera.

There are a few things that we can be positive about. To reduce single-use plastics, the government has levied a tax on plastic packaging with less than 30% recycled content. In November 2021, royal assent was given to a wide-ranging Environment Act. It legislates for consistent waste collection in England and sets timetables for DRS and EPR.

A strategy with no champion

You may not know about resources and waste strategy. There are several reasons. A lot has occupied politicians’ minds since 2018. We’ve had Covid, the fallout from Brexit, the war in Ukraine, the Liz Truss fiasco, the energy crunch and the cost-of-living crisis. And the government, preoccupied by its own survival, has suffered a teenage identity crisis, with its leadership positions on shuffle.

Most importantly, the strategy has not had the high-profile political champion that such a radical package needs – a Nye Bevan or a Michael Heseltine. Its main elements have proved to be an extremely hard sell. The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) has bitterly opposed EPR, saying that extra costs for food manufacturers will be handed on to consumers. Small drinks manufacturers say that adding an increased cost to their products, under DRS, will put them out of business. Recycling trade associations argue that DRS will reduce volumes and divert revenues from well-functioning municipal collection streams.

Consequently, essential consultations have been delayed and milestones and deadlines have slipped. Under the strategy’s original deadline, 2022 was to be a key year, with a national scheme administrator appointed. That did not happen, leading to speculation that the reforms may be scrapped. In January, came an announcement. EPR is now set to begin nationally in 2024 and DRS the following year, for England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Inevitably, suspicions linger that the full strategy may never see the light of day. Meanwhile, Wales and Scotland have been moving ahead at their own speeds. Wales benefits from the Well-being of Future Generations Act, which embeds the principle of sustainable development, carbon reduction and biodiversity across all areas of government.

While English local authorities hugely improved their recycling rates in the 2000s, most had stuck at 45% or less, before Covid which decreased recycling rates. Welsh councils have already achieved an average of 65%, which is the third highest rate in the world, and the target of the national waste and resources strategy. Consistent collection has become the norm in Wales, without the need for legislation.

The Scottish government is also more committed to waste reform than Westminster. On current plans, a DRS scheme will begin in Scotland in August, earlier than the rest of UK. Environment minister, Lord Benyon, has described this is a “ridiculous” move that will “create carnage”. He has predicted “bottle cruises” in which people travel south of the border to buy drinks at 50% less cost. Oh dear, what a mess.

Waste is a devolved issue but to achieve a national circular economy will require close co-operation between Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff. There’s not much chance of that happening any time soon. The inability to deal with rubbish is the most basic indication of political failure. But this failure is not merely aesthetic, it’s about a lack of commitment to sustainability and human survival. Faltering environmental advances made under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, ‘the king of wind’, are now sliding into reverse.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He has written for the Guardian and the New Statesman and was editor of a weekly, then monthly magazine, Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own