Government announces plans to extend the single-use plastic bag charge to all retailers

The 5p plastic bag charge will be extended to all retailers and not just big businesses, subject to consultation later this year, to help fight the global scourge of plastic pollution, Prime Minister Theresa May has announced today (30 August).

It is estimated over 3.4 billion single-use plastic bags are supplied annually by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Trade bodies representing 40,000 small retailers have already launched a voluntarily approach to a 5p charge, but this accounts for less than one-fifth of England’s estimated 220,000 SMEs.

A consultation, to be launched later this year, will also explore the possibility of increasing the 5p minimum charge to encourage further behaviour change, potentially doubling it to at least 10p.

Welcoming today’s announcement Environment Secretary Michael Gove said:

We are committed to being a global leader in tackling plastic pollution. It blights our seas and land and chokes our wildlife.

Thanks to the public’s support, our plastic bag charge has been hugely successful. It has taken 13 billion plastic bags out of circulation in the last two years alone.

Today we are building on that success to ensure we leave our environment in a better state than we inherited it.

The move follows the success of the 5p charge introduced in 2015, which has seen plastic bag sales in major supermarkets drop by 86%. This is equivalent to just 19 bags in 2016/17 per person in England, compared with 140 bags each before the government introduced the charge.