BPF’s director-general Philip Law explains BPF’s productive start to 2024 after an insightful roundtable with the shadow minister for Business and Decarbonisation, Sarah Jones.
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The BPF hit the ground running at the opening of 2024.
The highlight of January was a meeting with Sarah Jones MP, the shadow minister for Business and Decarbonisation. A small and representative group of BPF members, plus myself, met her for a discussion - a breakfast roundtable - on Wednesday, January 17th.
Coming in the wake of the Government’s Advanced Manufacturing Plan it was interesting to discuss the Labour Party’s approach through its own Industrial Strategy. BPF is, of course, politically neutral and judges the policies of political parties solely on their internal merits. It has no interest in ideology or personality.
Sarah Jones is the MP for Croydon Central and has a background in the civil service. She has only been in the role for six months, having succeeded Bill Esterson whom we had also met. He is now Shadow Minister for Roads. Sarah Jones’s role is interesting as it links up two related activities and this is very much a hallmark of Keir Starmer’s approach, wanting to create a much more ‘joined up’ government.
Given her short period of tenure, she was very much in listening mode and certainly had an open mind. As I related the plastics industry’s key dimensions, she confessed that she was ‘blown away’ by the fact that we employ 155,000 people, making us the third largest manufacturing industry in the UK. She was equally impressed by the range of products which were key to national security in terms of defence and the infrastructures for energy supply, transport, food and water distribution, healthcare and electronic communications. We told her that the City of London would not be able to function without plastics.
Our members did us proud by articulating the BPF’s six current requests of the government. Bruce Margetts of Bericap spoke on the need for legislation on packaging to consider the benefits it brings such as reductions in food waste.
BPF staffer, Mo Elkhalifa, pressed for recognition of mass balance techniques to measure the presence of chemical recyclate in products.
BPF president, Nigel Flowers of Sumitomo Demag, put the case for more government support for upskilling and a more joined-up approach to training throughout government and educational institutions. He also called for more government grants to be available to help the industry deploy more energy-efficient equipment in an attempt to decarbonise the industry.
Martin Hitchin of Rehau urged for the revenues of the Plastic Packaging Tax to be deployed in developing the plastics recycling infrastructure.
Mike Boswell of Plastribution called for a minimisation of trade barriers and greater alignment of legislation with the EU.
Sarah Jones concluded that “plastics is a cross-cutting foundational industry that we need to make sure we have a plan for.’’
Within a week of the meeting, two Parliamentary Questions on chemical recycling were posed to the government by her colleagues. Immediately after she left the meeting, she participated in a Radio 5 Live programme in which she quickly rebuffed a call for a ban on plastics with data she had been given by us only minutes before. She might become an important figure in our future.