Littering From Vehicles Outside London (Keepers: Civil Penalties) Regulations 2018
Debate between Lord Bassam of Brighton and Baroness Stowell of Beeston
Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)
My Lords, I was not going to intervene in this discussion but I am fascinated by this debate on littering. The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, is a wonderful chap. I love his persistence. I well remember the guns registration issue because he rightly hounded me on it for two years. As he said, the then Government eventually sorted it out. He was right to say that that measure was obstructed inside the then Government.
I have a beef and it is called the A27. I am delighted that my noble friend Lady Jones is on our Front Bench because the A27 is the litter epicentre of the south-east. What grieves me most is that it is clear that someone there is failing to take responsibility for clearing it up properly. I would like to know who that is. I think the responsibility rests with the Highways Agency as I am sure that I have seen its contractors tackling this but they appear only once a year. In the intervening period, that road is a haven for rubbish and litter. That is not good enough. One of the reasons for the litter is that the road is not cleared frequently enough and a contract to do so is not let over sufficient phases of the year. I believe that this has a lot to do with the fact that contracts are not let in that way and that contractors do not have an obligation to clear the road when it becomes badly littered.
I have a serious question about this legislation, which I am sure is very well intentioned: what is the incentive for a district council to become involved in proceedings—civil proceedings at that—and follow up complaints made to it? Where is the incentive for it to deploy the “person power” to enforce this legislation? There are already enough financial pressures on local councils regarding all the other things they are supposed to enforce, so I cannot see that they will want to chase complaints and complainants of this sort. No doubt this is a very well-meaning measure but I guess that it will be barely enforced, as has been the case with all other litter legislation in the past. Will the Minister do some research on this and tell your Lordships on how many occasions people have been brought before the courts and fined for littering offences in the last two or three decades? My mind goes back to the time when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. She introduced legislation by which she tried to grade the litter acceptability of land, and we were told that it would solve the problem. The problem is still with us and, until we get regular cleaning of the waysides and footpaths along roads and highways, it will not be solved.
This legislation is clearly well-meaning, but we need to know a lot more about the incentives to local government and the level of activity that has been employed so far in enforcing legislation in the past.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, I will make a brief contribution to this debate. I welcome these regulations, which tackle an important matter. However, I will use this opportunity to say something a bit more broadly about the topic of litter. While it is important that regulations are available to local authorities to go after people who commit these offences—doing things that are so unacceptable to us—it is also worth thinking about what more we can do to prevent litter in the first place.
Earlier this week there was a significant debate here in the Chamber about the Government’s environmental plan, and I was disappointed only that I was not able to participate in it. I absolutely share the commitment of the Government—and so many people—to a lot of the initiatives we are adopting to preserve our environment, and it is right that the Government, schools and everybody else use interest in preserving marine life and so on to encourage interest among young people and everybody else in the environmental issues that form part of the Government’s environmental plan. However, in the last few weeks the Government’s litter strategy, published just before the 2017 general election, caught my attention. It is incredibly important.
One thing that is a nuisance for us is the increasing litter we see, not just on our roads and our pavements, outside shops and fast food restaurants, but on public transport. We are not doing enough to encourage ourselves as citizens to take on responsibility for tackling these sorts of things. A few weeks ago I managed to gate-crash a meeting of a local authority about litter and the litter strategy, where I had the huge privilege of meeting the environmental manager for the area I live. This gentleman had worked for the local authority and is now in one of the subcontracted companies, and is responsible for litter. He cared very much about our area and was absolutely passionate about keeping our streets clean. I liked this chap. Through him, we managed to get some additional litter bins on our public roads in the area.
I wanted to have a conversation with one of the local shopkeepers, whose outside area can be rather unkempt and which rather lets us down because of the increasing litter. I spoke to him about the litter outside his shop and said, “You know, you are a very important man in our community. You are responsible for one of the most important hubs of our local environment”. I was able to encourage him and his sense of his importance in keeping our area clean and devoid of litter, and I do not think that he had ever understood and appreciated just how much of an important role he plays in his society.
While it is important that we have regulations that tackle people who adopt these kind of nuisance behaviours, that should not mean that we should avoid encouraging people to accept responsibility. We should acknowledge the importance of people, whether they are shop managers or bus drivers who find people abusing the vehicles that they are proud to drive themselves, and get behind them to support them to maintain the standards that are so important to us. That should prevent these kind of regulations ever having to be deployed.