Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord De Mauley Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord De Mauley)]

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend for introducing the Bill and giving us a further opportunity to debate the important issue of litter. I also thank all noble Lords who have given up their Friday to speak when they would much prefer to have been out in the sun—perhaps, like my noble friend, counting gum spots on the pavement or, even better, picking up litter.

As I have emphasised in several recent debates, litter is a blight on our streets and on our landscape. More than that, it is an entirely avoidable problem. It is never necessary to drop litter, and most people are aware that it is a criminal offence to do so, but that knowledge does not seem to stop them. My noble friend gave us some statistics; here are some more. Research by Keep Britain Tidy suggests that almost two-thirds of people in Britain drop litter, but less than a third admit to it.

Despite that rather worrying statistic, there is also a great depth of public feeling about litter and the need for firmer action to tackle it. More than 10,000 people joined Keep Britain Tidy during Love Where You Live month in June this year to take part in clean-ups in their local areas. My department receives a fairly constant stream of correspondence on the subject, suggesting any number of actions that the Government should take, including those proposed by my noble friend in his Bill: to increase fines or provide more bins.

As I have said several times recently, solutions to this pernicious problem are rarely straightforward. My noble friend’s first proposal is that the minimum fine for littering should be increased. At present, local authorities may set fines for littering and similar environmental offences of anywhere between £50 and £80, with a default of £75 if they do not set a local amount. My noble friend proposes that the minimum fine should rise to £100 without a statutory maximum.

I fully understand my noble friend’s desire to send a message to the public about the seriousness of littering as an offence. Not only does the problem add to everyone's council tax bill in cleansing and enforcement costs but, the very presence of dropped litter can lead to an increase in anti-social behaviour. This in turn increases people's fear of crime and discourages them from going out to use our wonderful and varied public places.

Litter also has environmental impacts: on wild animals and birds which eat it, and on pollution levels in our water courses. However, research by Keep Britain Tidy conducted in 2011 showed that public opinion is divided over whether fixed penalties are an effective way to change people’s behaviour and that in areas where more fixed-penalty notices are issued, the public satisfaction with levels of cleanliness is often still low. An increase in the fine for littering is of course only as effective as the enforcement action which leads to the fine being issued. As we discussed earlier when debating my noble friend Lord Marlesford’s Bill on littering from vehicles, enforcement officers cannot be everywhere at once. The more often that people drop their litter without facing any consequences, the less effective a deterrent—the seemingly remote possibility of a fine—becomes, however high it may be.

Enforcement is also expensive. While higher fines might help to pay for more enforcement officers, the fine will be paid only if the offender can afford it. If he cannot, the case is likely to go to court and will result in even greater costs to all concerned, without ever improving the offender’s ability to pay or the likelihood of those costs being recovered.

The absence of a maximum fine may also leave the system open to potential abuse. The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, shared some of those concerns. We already hear stories in the popular press of individuals who are justifiably indignant about having been fined by overzealous enforcement officers for so-called littering when they have accidentally dropped a £10 note, or for feeding the ducks in the park. The public are already suspicious that some local authorities use these enforcement powers to raise additional revenue. I would hope that it is obvious to your Lordships that we do not expect local authorities to use fixed-penalty notices for trivial incidents in this way at all, but I can only imagine how more aggrieved and suspicious those individuals would feel if faced with a fine of more than £100. Some of the local authorities that my officials have spoken to, informally, have expressed concern that this proposal could put enforcement officers at increased risk of challenge or even violence.

What is more, the increase that my noble friend proposes would, I suggest, be disproportionate in comparison with other offences. For example, fines for criminal damage, for making nuisance calls or for possession of class B drugs are all set at £80 and are payable in 28 days, while this Bill proposes fines of at least £100 which are payable in 14 days. With no statutory maximum the perverse situation could even arise where the on-the-spot fine exceeded the maximum penalty which could be imposed if the case went to court. I assure my noble friend that if there is evidence of the current fines being too low to enable successful enforcement I am open to requests from local authorities to review the regulations which set the minimum and maximum limits. However, I have significant reservations about the blanket approach proposed in the Bill.

However, it is the second part of my noble friend’s Bill which gives me most concern. The Bill would require local authorities to “provide appropriate disposal” points,

“for chewing gum and cigarette litter”,

within four metres of the entrance to any building,

“for which the local authority is responsible”,

and at least one disposal point per 100 square metres throughout the area for which the local authority is the responsible litter authority.

The Explanatory Notes to the Bill which my noble friend has helpfully provided suggest that, by making provision for local authorities to finance the provision of these disposal units through advertising, this proposal could be implemented at zero cost to local authorities. This type of litter is indeed a persistent problem, as my noble friend suggested. In the most recent Local Environmental Quality Survey of England, smoking-related litter was found to be the most prevalent form of litter and present on 82% of sites surveyed. Staining from discarded chewing gum was found on 68% of sites, down a small percentage from the previous year, and is known to be one of the most difficult and costly local environmental quality problems to tackle.

However, your Lordships will appreciate that what is proposed in the Bill adds up to a truly staggering number of bins. While potentially appropriate in some busy urban areas, the number of bins required by the Bill is likely to be vastly disproportionate to actual demand in rural areas, on council-owned open spaces or on land with very limited public access. For example, placing one bin every 100 square metres would mean that more than 70 would be required on a council-owned village green the size of a regulation football pitch. This, presumably, does not include the bins that my noble friend mentioned in his speech for what he calls “dog excreta”. Even if supported by income from advertising, the costs of installing such a vast number of bins and their ongoing maintenance and emptying would, I am afraid, be prohibitive to local authorities.

Moreover, even if they were well maintained, the provision of more disposal points might not even resolve the underlying problem because research shows that those who discard their chewed gum or their cigarette stubs often do not perceive them to be litter, so people may not think to look for or use these bins even if they were available. At present, local authorities have the power and, most importantly, the discretion to make their own decisions about how many and what types of bins should be provided throughout their areas to address the specific issues that occur. This is consistent with our commitments on localism, and surely has to be the right answer. Of course, my reservations about my noble friend’s Bill do not mean that I do not share his concerns about this blight on our landscape. However, as I have said several times in recent debates, we do not believe that further regulation is necessarily the right approach to this issue.

Your Lordships may be aware that my department has for some years chaired the Chewing Gum Action Group, which is made up of chewing gum manufacturers and is supported by Keep Britain Tidy and its equivalent organisations in the devolved Administrations. We are of course grateful for the support that chewing gum manufacturers have shown over several years for campaigns aimed at reducing the amount of chewed gum that is dropped on our streets and elsewhere. These have certainly produced a benefit in reduced chewing gum litter, at least for the period of the campaign, in some cases achieving reductions of up to 90% in gum drops in the campaign area. However, in many cases it seems that chewing gum litter levels rise again once the effect of the campaigns has worn off.

Chewing gum remains much harder to remove than other forms of litter, as several noble Lords have mentioned, given the way in which it bonds to pavement surfaces. As a consequence, local authorities still spend tens of millions of pounds a year in laboriously clearing it up, and this cost is much higher per tonne of chewing gum litter than for other kinds of litter. More work is clearly needed, and research shows that the public agree. Recent work by Keep Britain Tidy found that 82% of the British public think that businesses should do more to prevent litter. Work that KBT has done has shown that when a business’s product and brand is seen in the gutter as litter, that can have a real, negative impact on that business’s bottom line, and many businesses are starting to recognise this.

One obvious solution, on which I would like to see much more emphasis, and this was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, is the bringing to market of non-stick chewing gums that do not bond to the surface on which they are dropped—although, to address directly one of the points raised by the noble Baroness, I am not sure whether it would still stick to the bedpost. I understand that there are several kinds of non-stick chewing gum that have already been shown to be technically feasible and which could therefore be quickly made available. They could have a taste and texture almost identical to current brands. If these could rapidly replace existing formulations then no one would lose out, and local council tax payers would save the tens of millions of pounds a year that are currently diverted towards tackling this avoidable problem.

Of course education must continue to discourage the extremely anti-social habit of dropping chewing gum, but I believe that manufacturers and retailers could and should play a bigger part in helping here, without the need for government regulation to bring that about. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, asked specifically what happened following the debate last year; my noble friend Lord Taylor mentioned a meeting. Manufacturers assure us that they have spent a significant amount of resources on developing a biodegradable or non-stick gum. Part of the problem in developing it, I understand, is that the same ingredients that make it gum also make it sticky. The product has to meet safety standards and be pleasant to consume, and these requirements have not to date been met by a cleaner gum. Ultimately, the choice of material is a commercial decision but we would welcome design solutions to the problem of chewing gum litter. However, behaviour change, as the noble Baroness said, is also important in the battle against litter.

I have a great deal of sympathy for my noble friend’s depth of feeling on this subject. I agree with him that local authorities should be encouraged to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing and to dispose of their litter responsibly. Unfortunately, though, as I have explained, I must express reservations about his Bill.