It's quite wondrous how badly politics works as a solution to things
There is a political move to make us all £622 million poorer.
This is not a good idea.
But then that's politics for you. The suggestion is:
A25p latte levy should be introduced on disposable coffee cups to cut waste, MPs have said. The plan is being considered by ministers amid calls for a complete ban on all disposable cups by 2023 unless manufacturers can make them recyclable.
It follows research which shows the UK throws away 2.5 billion paper cups every year, with many consumers believing they are being recycled when less than 1 per cent actually are.
The rest are incinerated or buried in landfill sites because they have an inner-lining made of plastic which paper mills struggle to remove.
The Environmental Audit Committee is calling on the Government to introduce a minimum 25p charge to cut waste in the same way the plastic bag levy has done in supermarkets.
That there's no component of a coffee cup which is in short supply nor likely to run out is one thing to say about this. However, as ever, it gets worse. Back in March 2017 we had a study of those very coffee cups and the effects of a deposit upon them, something one of us explained here.
Idiocy may not be a word contained within the report, but the research found that a charge of 25p per cup only gets a few per cent of people to take a reusable one. The vast majority of people shrug and take the standard ones which, after that 20 minutes of use, pile up in a landfill site.
The charge doesn't change behaviour. So, that's one justification of such a Pigou Tax out the window. The other possible justification is that the revenues raised should be spent upon dealing with the problem. Yet we can also calculate what is the cost of the problem. That's some £3 million a year. For that is what the cost, as measured by the Landfill Tax, is to stick the nation's discarded coffee cup[s into holes in the ground.
A decent enough stab at the revenue raised from this tax is some £625 million (2.5 billion cups, 25 pence per cup). That is, there would be a charge of £625 million to solve a £3 million problem. This makes us poorer.
This is not a good idea.
But then this is how modern politics works apparently. Nine months on from the scientific proof that this is a damn bad idea it's an actual policy proposal.