Littering From Vehicles Outside London (Keepers: Civil Penalties) Regulations 2018

Viscount Simon Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Viscount Simon (Lab)]

My Lords, I will be brief. In many other countries there is no litter on the ground or the roads at all. How come? Their drivers are encouraged to have litter bins in their cars. Why cannot we do the same?

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her introduction to this important piece of legislation. I declare an interest as a district councillor. I was interested in the contributions made by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, and the noble Baroness.

We have all seen cars driving past us, or followed cars from which rubbish has been thrown carelessly out of the window. As we have heard, litter is one of the scourges of our throwaway society. When I was growing up, it was very unusual to see the countryside and pavements littered with bottles and packages. Sadly, now it is commonplace. If this issue is not addressed, we will all be knee-deep in litter. As the noble Lord indicated, there appears to be an attitude among some car drivers—but not all—that they do not need to take their rubbish home and dispose of it safely. Winding down the window appears to be a better option for some of them.

In the market town of Yeovil a few years ago on a retail park site, KFC, previously known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, opened a first new outlet. On the day it opened, a free meal was offered to the first batch of customers. The queues of cars to get to the outlet stretched around the site and down to the bypass. I believe that in excess of 6,000 meals were served that day. Sadly, afterwards, the litter from the takeaway meals was strewn for many miles around the town and countryside. The fact that this opening was such a major event in Yeovil says a lot about the level of leisure activities available—but that is another matter.

Fining motorists for discarding their litter from cars is a start to helping to solve this problem. However, it also has to be tackled at source as well. Burger King, McDonald’s and KFC, as well as other outlets of a similar nature, have their part to play: first, in providing incentives and signage, encouraging their customers to dispose of their litter sensibly and with a view to the state of the environment; but also in making their packaging biodegradable, including their drinking cups and straws and the food containers. It will simply not be good enough to say that it is only on “Blue Planet II” that marine life is endangered by plastic. What of the rarely seen hedgehog, the urban and rural fox, and badgers, mice and voles, which are all likely to pick up and try to eat discarded waste that smells so invitingly of food?

This piece of legislation is long overdue. The keeper is responsible for the action of their passengers. It contains exemptions for taxi drivers, who may not be able to control their passengers’ bad habits. The language in the SI makes it very clear what processes will be involved to ensure that those guilty persons are pursued and fined. There are appeal mechanisms and adjudicators.

My concern is that the enforcement falls back on the “litter authority”. As usual, this is a district council, or a county council where there is no district council, and applies only to England and the Council of the Isles of Scilly, as the Minister said. The good point about collecting the fines is that they may be kept by the collecting authority for execution of its duties under the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act of 2005. The number of reasons that the recipient of fines can give as an excuse for not paying the fine are extensive and lean overly towards the offender. I am concerned that many will be able to wriggle out of paying.

I hope that the fines imposed and collected will recompense the local authorities for the work involved. This should send a big message to the public that the country is no longer prepared to accept such loutish behaviour from car drivers and their passengers. I fully support the SI.