DAVID MILIBAND indicated yesterday that he backed an extra tax on household rubbish to make the “polluter pay” as he urged councils to take the lead in boosting the green agenda and tackling climate change.

The Environment Secretary said he was personally interested in the idea first suggested by Sir Michael Lyons last month in an interview with The Times. Sir Michael, who is conducting an inquiry into local government finance, said he was looking at a variety of charges for non-recyclable waste to supplement council tax, including variable waste-charging, where householders are charged according to the amount of rubbish they put out.

Speaking at the Local Government Association’s annual conference in Bournemouth Mr Miliband said that he could not pre-empt Sir Michael’s inquiry, which reports later this year, but there were a number of variants, including charging households according to the amount of blackbag waste they produce with recycling being collected for free. “But the principle is simple: the polluter pays.”

Mr Miliband is the first Cabinet minister to back the idea in principle but Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, is said to be resisting the plan on the ground that people would think they were paying twice for rubbish collection.

There are also fears that the scheme would result in flytipping with residents dumping rubbish in their neighbours’ front gardens or down the street. This has not proved the case in Europe, however, where charging is widespread.

“Variable charging must be looked at in the context of wider changes to local government finance,” Mr Miliband said. “But . . . I would like to hear from the LGA and local authorities with more detail about household waste-charging, looking at examples from other European countries to determine whether there could be benefits for England.”

His comments came after an LGA survey of 1,719 respondents which showed clear support for a rubbish tax for non-recyclable waste. About 64 per cent said they would prefer a system where they paid less tax but were charged directly for household rubbish, so that the more waste recycled the less people would pay.

Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the LGA chairman, said that unless the Government went ahead with radical reforms of waste disposal, recycling rates would not meet the EU landfill directive, which requires local councils to recycle 33 per cent of their waste by 2015.

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