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Mr Machin also said the EPR fees should be delayed and the government should rethink its approach to business rates.

Mr Machin said EPR would "give retailers a tax bill 20 times the current amount with £2bn going straight to the Treasury as general taxation and no improvement to recycling".

Its official name is extended producer responsibility law, EPR.

The great fear, I’m sure, of the fossil fuel industry, which is looking to plastic as a way of extending their customer base, is that the EPR principle could be applied to almost anything and should be applied to almost anything.

In September, we reported that more than 24,000 letters from Newcastle hospitals had not been sent from their EPR system and more than 400,000 letters had got lost in computer systems at hospitals in Nottingham.