Just one week after Theresa May and Michael Gove promised to eradicate the scourge of plastic waste, government budget cuts have forced a key agency charged with tackling the problem to make more than a tenth of its staff redundant, a move campaigners said could sabotage progress.
About 25 people are losing their jobs at the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), the body’s chief executive confirmed on Wednesday.
Marcus Gover blamed successive cuts to government funding. “Sadly, we cannot achieve the scale of savings we need without losing staff. This has been a difficult decision and is always a last resort,” he said.
The timing of the announcement will be an embarrassment for the prime minister and environment secretary.
One of the headline initiatives in their 25-year environment plan, published last Thursday, was to look at establishing plastic-free aisles in supermarkets, with food sold loose instead. Wrap has been charged with exploring the idea, and it is unclear whether the proposal will be taken forward after the job cuts.
The 25-year plan put Wrap in charge of a major project to eliminate “unnecessary and problematic” single use plastic and significantly increase plastic recycling rates.
Louise Edge, Greenpeace UK’s senior oceans campaigner, said: “By allowing this agency’s workforce to shrink, the government could be sabotaging a key plank of its much-vaunted strategy to tackle the scourge of throwaway plastic. If Theresa May wants people to believe in the promises she made, she’ll have to show her government is willing to put some resources behind their effort to tackle plastic waste.”
While the redundancies were made public on Wednesday, one source told the Guardian that the decision had been made days ago. May last week called plastic waste “one of the great environmental scourges of our time”.
Wrap is a private limited company and charity that was set up in 2000, and has led efforts to cut plastic bag use, reduce food waste and encourage recycling. It is predominantly funded by the environment department, but had its funding from central government slashed from £37.7m in 2011/12 to £15.6m in 2016/17.
Gover blamed a “significant drop” in income since 2015 for the decision to shed jobs, which he said had become unavoidable. The agency employs 180 staff, which will shrink after the redundancies which are expected to take place before the end of March.
The environment department said that it was continuing to work closely with Wrap, and expected to agree its budget for 2018/2019 soon.
“Reducing plastic waste, improving recycling and increasing resource efficiency are a crucial part of our 25-year environment plan,” said a Defra spokesperson.