Report: Shaping future financial and fiscal policies for a more circular UK economy
23 January 2025
Our latest research, featured in CIWM’s report, ‘Shaping future financial and fiscal policies for a more circular economy in the UK’, explores the main incentives being introduced and how they could be strengthened.
The report assesses unintended consequences, gaps, conflicts, and synergies with seven key fiscal and financial policy initiatives, identifying potential improvements to them and drawing overall lessons for future policy design. These include:
- Building in more nuanced incentives to achieve goals like reuse, reduction, higher quality recycling, and decarbonisation: such as driving reuse through extended producer responsibility (EPR) and increasing recycling and greater reuse of inert materials through updating the Landfill Tax.
- Refocusing policy efforts on the sectors and material streams that can deliver the most significant overall impacts.
- Ensuring robust data, monitoring, and enforcement to ensure these incentives have the intended effects.
The research is intended to highlight a clearer path towards reaching three distinct aims: increasing recycling, reducing resource consumption, and decarbonising the waste and resources sector.
“The benefits of incentivising a more circular UK economy, one where materials are kept in use for as long as possible, are clear. It creates jobs, enables economic growth, and delivers resource resilience and carbon reduction.
“This timely piece of research provides useful insights for our sector, policy makers, governments and the Circular Economy Taskforce. The findings can help us consider how well-crafted financial incentives and policies can most effectively move us towards a more circular UK economy.
“The report shows that financial levers can have a powerful effect, and several have already driven positive trends to move materials and behaviours up the waste hierarchy. It also shows that strong data, monitoring and enforcement are essential to ensure incentives have the intended effects.”
Dan Cooke, CIWM
“The policy incentives for a more circular, lower-carbon economy need to be adjusted and improved over time as we learn from experience what works and where the gaps are. This report highlights areas where more nuanced fiscal and financial incentives are needed to drive not just more recycling, but higher-quality recycling that contributes more to the economy, as well as reuse and remanufacturing activities which can drastically reduce the environmental impacts of our resource use.”
Susan Evans, Resource Futures
