Lords produce waste paper on waste policy

There was a time when, if a Lords committee had been asked to investigate a massive policy failure, a scandal which continues to make daily headlines in the press, it might have made some effort to ask why things had gone so horrendously wrong. But when 12 peers last week reported on the shambles engulfing the way that Britain disposes of its rubbish, the result was 127 pages of such anodyne verbiage that no one ploughing through it would have any idea that we have a national crisis on our hands. In fact the headlines about the disintegration of Britain's system of waste disposal - from householders being fined for putting rubbish in the wrong bin to the epidemic of flytipping - reflect only a small part of the disaster.