Why the Circular Economy Plan Can’t Be Left to Wait
Helen Tandy, Founding Director
Back in March, Hannah and Kerry from Chester Repair Café were part of something that felt like real momentum, they were in the Houses of Parliament, alongside more than a hundred community repair groups from across the UK, as part of The Restart Project’s annual Parliamentary Repair Café. Fixers helping MPs get hands-on with a hairdryer, a kettle, an iron; a record 91 MPs turning up in person; the Circular Economy Minister speaking, and the Secretary of State for DEFRA dropping by to meet the repair café from her own constituency. For a movement that’s spent years being politely nodded at and then filed under “nice to have,” it felt like repair and reuse were finally being taken seriously at the top.
Six months on, that momentum has stalled, and not because the public support disappeared. It stalled because the people at the top changed.
What actually happened
Since that day in Westminster, there’s been a change of Prime Minister, and a reshuffle that moved on both the Circular Economy Minister and the DEFRA Secretary who stood in that room in March. The Circular Economy Growth Plan, the strategy meant to set the framework for England’s shift away from a throwaway economy — has now been delayed repeatedly: first pushed from autumn 2025 to early 2026, then to spring 2026, and as of the summer, still with no firm publication date.
Industry insiders are openly worried that the leadership change could be, in their words, the plan’s “death knell.”
That’s not a small administrative delay. It’s years of cross-party groundwork, over 150 MPs signed The Restart Project’s Repair and Reuse Declaration, the Circular Economy Taskforce built recommendations with repair and reuse embedded throughout, businesses from IKEA to Michelin to Virgin Media O2 have written jointly demanding the plan’s release, all sitting in limbo because the people who’d championed it moved desks.
Why this matters for the work we do
At Eco Communities, we don’t wait for national policy to get moving before we act — we can’t, and we never have. The Full Circle Refill network, the sewing machine loan scheme we launched at Chester Green Festival, our home repair kits — all of that keeps going regardless of what’s happening in Westminster. Local, practical, hands-on change doesn’t need permission from a Growth Plan. Plus the regions growing number of Repair Café projects
But it needs the legislation to catch up. Every refill hub we open, every repair we teach someone to do themselves, is fighting against a system that’s still built for products designed to be replaced, not fixed, packaging with no reuse infrastructure behind it, electronics with no requirement to be repairable, a recycling rate that’s flatlined for fifteen years. We can shift behaviour street by street. We can’t shift the design standards, the producer responsibility rules, or the incentives that make repair the easy choice rather than the expensive one. That’s what national legislation is for, and it’s exactly what’s been sitting, unpublished, for the best part of a year.
The ask
The good news is that the pressure that got 91 MPs into a room in March hasn’t gone anywhere, and it worked before. The Restart Project is now asking people to make sure the new Prime Minister and the incoming DEFRA ministers are left in no doubt about the scale of support that’s already been built. Their current campaign asks you to write to your MP and request they:
- Write directly to the Prime Minister about their support for repair and reuse policy, and
- Sign the Repair and Reuse Declaration themselves, if they haven’t already
It takes a couple of minutes through their tool, and it genuinely does move things, MPs have told The Restart Project directly that a single constituent email makes them far more likely to show up, ask a question in the chamber, or write to a minister.
Ask your MP to back repair and reuse →
Don’t let this quietly disappear
Delayed government strategies have a way of becoming cancelled government strategies if nobody keeps asking where they’ve gone. Chester Repair Café turned up in Parliament in March to say repair matters here. It’s worth five minutes now to make sure that doesn’t get lost in a reshuffle.
In the meantime, in Cheshire volunteers will keep doing what we do — refilling, repairing, teaching people the skills that were quietly dropped from the school curriculum a generation ago. But we’d much rather be doing it with the wind of a proper Circular Economy Growth Plan behind us than in spite of its absence.
