Single-use items like plastic cutlery, plates and trays will be banned in England, the government has confirmed.

It is not clear when the ban will come into effect, but it follows similar moves already made by Scotland and Wales.

Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey said the move would help protect the environment for future generations.

Campaigners welcomed the ban, but called for a wider-ranging plastic reduction strategy.

Government figures suggest that 1.1 billion single-use plates and more than four billion pieces of plastic cutlery are used in England every year.

Plastic waste often does not decompose and can last in landfill for many years.

Although it might be useful in terms of food hygiene, it can also end up as litter, in turn polluting soil and water.

The confirmation of the move from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) follows a long consultation, which will be published on Saturday 14 January.

At least 18 councils across the UK confirmed on Thursday that they are experiencing ongoing disruptions to their bin collection services. 

It is due to staff self-isolating and a lack of heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers for bin lorries.

The Local Government Association (LGA) told the BBC that the delays were primarily affecting garden waste.

However, some councils are also delaying recycling collections in order to prioritise general waste. 

It comes as three councils in Devon wrote to Home Secretary Priti Patel on Thursday, asking for the government to grant temporary visas for trained European HGV drivers to ease the shortage.

“At the time of writing, North Devon Council are attempting to fill seven [bin lorry driver] vacancies, Torbay Council eight vacancies, and Teignbridge Council 10 vacancies,” wrote councillors Steve Darling, David Worden and Alistair Dewhirst. 

“This equates to approximately 20% of the HGV workforce in driver vacancies and it is proving very challenging to fill this resourcing gap given the dynamics of this labour market.” 

The UK currently has a shortfall of about 100,000 HGV drivers, after many EU workers returned home following Brexit and during the pandemic. 

Ministers say UK employers should hire locally to fill the gap, but the councils said it would take time to train the next generation of drivers. 

Michael Gove turned up to discuss environment issues with ministers carrying a disposable coffee cup, despite leading the country’s efforts to tackle plastic waste.

The environment secretary has previously been pictured using a reusable cup, amid growing pressure to tackle the 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups thrown away in the UK every year.

Mr Gove even handed out bamboo coffee cups to members of the cabinet in January, after ministers were spotted bringing disposable cups to meetings.

However, the reusable version appeared to have been abandoned in favour of a plastic-lined, single-use cup as he gave evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on the work of Defra – including topics such as farming, air quality and post-Brexit plans.

Almost a third of agricultural businesses and rural land owners across the North East, Yorkshire and Humber have had illegal waste dumped on their land in the last three years, according to new research commissioned by ‘right Waste, right Place’.

The research follows a warning from the Environment Agency for landowners not to be duped into storing waste after a spate of incidents across the region.

Just last month, waste criminals dumped 600 bales of general waste on private land in Tow Law, County Durham.

Businesses, particularly those in rural areas, are targeted by criminals looking to dispose of waste illegally by dumping it in warehouses, mills and open spaces. These criminals can be persuasive, convincing landowners to give them access to property, which they then fill with waste and abandon, leaving the landowner with an expensive clearance bill.

According to the research, more than half of those in the North East, Yorkshire and Humber who have been affected by fly-tipping in the last three years disposed of the waste themselves. Just 16 percent called the police.

Fly-tipping, illegal tips and tax evasion are costing the UK more than half a billion pounds a year, according to a report on waste crime.

Crimes such as dumped building rubble and deliberate misclassification of waste to evade tax are “widespread and endemic”, according to the report commissioned by the Environmental Services Association Education Trust (ESAET) and conducted by Eunomia.

But despite the scale of the problem, the Environment Agency, that tackles waste crime, is set to lose 1,700 staff by the end of the year and has admitted it expects to “reduce our work on illegal waste activities”. The Sentencing Council last week recommended increasing fines for waste dumping, from well below £1m to up to £3m.

Barry Dennis, a trustee of the ESAET charity, said: “We need to stop thinking about ‘waste crime’ as somehow being less important than other crimes. Fly-tipping, rogue waste operations and tax evasion via the misclassification of waste are crimes that create health risks for the public, are costing the taxpayer millions of pounds a year and are funding organised crime.”

Dennis notes in the report that “it seems inconceivable that such serious financial pressure [on the EA] will not mean a squeeze on enforcement.”

The EA’s core spending was £17.4m in 2011-12, falling to £16.9m in 2012-13. ESAET estimate the cost of waste crime to be between £324m to £808m, with a best estimate of £568m, caused by loss of revenue for legal waste sites, tax evasion where, for example, hazardous waste is deliberately classified as standard, and the clean-up costs of fly-tipping.

“We pay a high council tax and this is just another example of the way they are chipping away at basic services that we are paying for,” she says. Like many residents, she is concerned that the bags will be ripped open by foxes, badgers and rats, posing a public health risk as well as being unsightly. The new “dumping points”, as locals call them, will also attract fly-tippers, she says.”

I am old enough to remember the Conservative Party Election Broadcast about the Winter of Discontent and this article made me recall the thousands of bin bags rotting in a large heap featured in that attack on the Jim Callaghan Government. I am sure there are two sides to this story and I don’t want to rush to judgement here. It does seem to me that in these hard time difficult issues for Councils leading to these approaches plus the closure of civic amenity sites run the risk of our rural landscapes becoming litter strewn. In relation to the article this week about valuing landscape assets I wonder what the negative value of a bag of dumped rubbish is?

The average residual waste per person has reduced by 76kg in 2006/07 to 275kg/person/year in 2011; and 55% of municipal waste generated in the UK is sent to landfill, compared to an EU-27 average of 40%. These figures sit alongside the Government’s Review of Waste Policy which has just been published.

Interestingly, whereas Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, had pledged to bring back to weekly rubbish collections in councils that currently have fortnightly pick-ups, in the Waste Review this commitment appears to be faltering. Whilst Eric Pickles described how “Whitehall and the town hall need to raise their game to deliver more frequent and better rubbish and recycling collections” the Review itself contains no mention of financial incentives to bring back weekly collections.

According to Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman: “People want to do the right thing by reducing waste and recycling at home or out and about and we want to help them. This means making sure communities are getting the collection services they want and not penalising hard-working households who make minor mistakes by putting bins out on the wrong day or leaving a plastic tub in the wrong recycling box”.

In addition to criticisms around the frequency of collections, many organisations (including CPRE) have described the policy document as a missed opportunity – lacking long-term recycling targets, and focusing on some areas such as food waste at the expense of other areas including packaging and materials.

More information about the Waste Review is available on the Defra website.

It goes on to explain “Almost 5,000 volunteers cleaned 376 beaches across the UK for the Big Weekend, covering a total of 167km. Over 330,000 items of litter were collected; 7% of it was bathroom waste, which included almost 16,000 cotton buds.”

With the start of the first major holiday of the season and high summer temperatures it is no surprise that articles like this are in the news and no-one could disagree with the sentiments here.

My work this week thinking (amongst other things) about the relationship between fishermen and conservationists has made me reflect very heavily on who has influence over our coastline – which is a national and in a significant number of rural places, a local , defining feature.

I still don’t think we give coastal issues have enough policy prominence and those who earn their living from the sea are certainly less well understood by most of us than their farming counterparts. I am happy to share what I am learning and its implications for a harbour or beach near you if you drop me a line.

There are concerns that other authorities, struggling to cope with reduced budgets, may follow Somerset’s lead.

This I suspect is the thin end of the wedge and I bet it will have a major impact on a rise in the iniquitous process of fly tipping which is already a scourge for many rural places. Yet another unintended likely consequence of the cuts.