Dog Fouling

Debate between Anne Main and Jim Fitzpatrick

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered dog fouling.

The aim of this debate is to raise awareness of the ongoing problem of dog fouling, specifically in woodland and rural areas. I am a dog owner and a dog lover, and I must declare an interest: I sponsor a dog through Dogs Trust, the UK’s largest dog welfare charity, which runs initiatives throughout the country to encourage more responsibility among dog owners. Such efforts to encourage responsible dog ownership are welcome, but we need to do so much more. This debate is not about dogs or demonising dog owners; it is about the actions of irresponsible or ignorant dog owners and the environmental blight caused by dog poo that is dealt with inappropriately.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs discontinued the collection of figures on the number of fixed penalty notices issued for dog fouling in 2010, as it was viewed as an unnecessary burden on local authorities. I agree—it would be enormously burdensome to keep collecting those data. The most recent figures show that 2,082 fixed penalty notices were issued in 2009. I gave the Minister some pictures before the debate to illustrate the extent of the bagged dog fouling problem. I suggest that those figures do not show the true extent of the problem.

Experience and anecdotal accounts from across the country show that this really is a big problem. It affects tourism, local authorities, private landowners, forestry commissions and farmers, as well as the public at large. I will refer later to the challenges that farmers face as a result of fouling on their farmland, as they have particular concerns about livestock safety, but the two key strands to my argument are the burgeoning nationwide problem of the inappropriate disposal of dog poo bags and how we can encourage the correct disposal of dog poo.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. Solutions need to be appropriate to the surroundings, well publicised and simple to execute. There is no doubt that dog fouling is an antisocial and environmentally damaging problem. It blights parks, forests and farmland as well as fields and verges. To compound the problem, we have seen the rise of the phenomenon of the ghastly dog poo bauble. Walkers, cyclists and families out with small children are greeted by lumps of dog faeces wrapped in pink, blue, black and even apricot-coloured plastic dangling from trees or bushes, or decoratively tied to people’s fences. Deer ingest the bags, children may handle the packages and cyclists have even ridden headlong into bags dangling from low-hanging branches. It is disgusting. Some dog walkers use sandwich bags, freezer bags or even supermarket carrier bags to scoop up the poo before lobbing it off into the environment, where it festers, causing blight for years.

I accept that many bags are biodegradable, but even if they are marketed as such, they still hang around for a very long time. According to the BBC’s Focus magazine, it can take six months or longer for even degradable dog poo bags to decompose. Although that is a marked improvement on the 500 years that scientists think it takes for a normal supermarket plastic bag to decompose, they are still a prolonged blight on the countryside landscape.

Initially, I thought that this foul practice of lobbing poo in bags into hedges and trees might be limited to a few irresponsible owners, but a quick trawl of social media and news archives shows that the problem is rampant and growing across Britain. It is estimated that local authorities receive upwards of 70,000 complaints a year about dog fouling, which is no small number. Local newspapers are filled with reports of the problems that it can cause, and Twitter is alive with concerns raised by people about the impact that dog fouling, particularly bagged dog fouling, has on their area.

Is it just me, Mr Hollobone? I do not understand the mentality of the person who enjoys walking on a beautiful woodland trail and goes to the trouble of purchasing and carrying a dog poo bag, picking up the often smelly deposit and even carrying it for a short distance, but then takes the opportunity to lob the carefully wrapped package up into the trees. I just do not understand it, but believe me, a quick look on the internet shows that that happens thousands of times every day.

Dog walking is one of life’s pleasures. Long rambles in the fresh air are good for dogs and their owners. Dogs Trust and many other groups strongly oppose blanket bans on dog walking in parks, beaches or countryside areas. I agree with them that that would be a great loss to communities of people who meet in those areas with their dogs and would directly punish the vast majority of dogs and their law-abiding owners just because of a select few offenders.

There are approximately 9 million pet dogs in the UK. One in four households in the UK has a pet dog, and they produce 1,000 tonnes of poo a day, or 365,000 tonnes a year. That is the weight of the Empire State building in New York or, to bring the problem closer to home, 5.6 times the weight of St Paul’s cathedral in dog excrement every year. We have a huge, smelly problem, and dog poo baubles are a relatively new and disgusting phenomenon. Online posts from Slough, Dartmoor, Rhondda, Glasgow and Kent, to name but a few places, show that this is a countrywide issue that we really need to tackle.

Keep Britain Tidy’s 2014-15 local environmental quality survey of England addressed both dog fouling and bagged dog fouling. Statistics that it gathered prove that dog walkers are far more likely to collect and dispose of dog poo when it is light and they feel they are being watched. In the light of that, Keep Britain Tidy started a “We’re watching you” campaign, which featured a pair of eyes that glowed in the dark and was designed to reinforce the message: “If you let your dog foul in an urban or rural area, someone may be watching you.” Often, of course, they are not. That campaign, which was trialled in 17 local authorities in 2014, led to a 46% reduction in recorded fouling and bagged fouling, but too often, the dog poo bauble is lobbed into the trees, away from sight.

It is argued that people should simply “bag it and bin it”. Would that it were that simple. Human nature often leads people to take an easy way out. Carrying a bag of poo for several hours on a family walk is often seen as an unattractive prospect, so, having been picked up, the poo gets lobbed into the bushes. We need to ensure that there are dog poo bins in appropriate locations, but that is only part of the solution.

The strategic placement of bins in rural parks and countryside dog walking hotspots is a key aid to prevent people from incorrectly disposing of dog poo bags. The National Trust is trying to address this issue on its sites by placing dog poo bins in the immediate area of car parks. Its studies show that, on leaving a vehicle, the vast majority of dogs relieve themselves within 50 metres of the vehicle. Having maps in car parks for country walk areas showing the placement of bins would also encourage more people to bag and bin poo, as they may know that the next bin is only a short distance away.

But that scheme cannot tackle the problem of bagged dog fouling in less populated woodland and countryside environments—open wild spaces where locating a bin would be impractical or even detrimental to the natural landscape. Lawrence Trowbridger, lead ranger at the National Trust’s Ashridge estate, said in an interview in 2015 that the solution was not just about introducing more bins but about

“challenging the mindset of the dog walker”.

I completely agree, so how do we change that mindset? How do we educate the public and steer them into good countryside practice?

I have a few suggestions, which I hope the Minister will look at. I believe that we need much better signage in areas such as country parks and forests to show where bins are located, so that people know how far they are from bins and whether bins are available past a certain point. Dog poo counts as waste refuse—not everyone is aware of that—so all waste bins, wherever they are located, should carry a logo showing that it is appropriate to put bagged dog poo in them.

For dog walkers further on in their walk and in a “no bin” area—an area of natural habitat—the sign at the entrance to the walk should show them that they ought to use the “stick and flick” approach, which the Forestry Commission advocates on its website, or cover the poo with leaves or vegetation. Having tried to stick and flick a pseudo-poo—it happened to be chocolate éclair, which did not flick at all well—on the Jeremy Vine show, I can say that that is actually quite an effective way of doing things. We need clear, easy-to-recognise graphics in parks, woodland areas and laybys close to footpaths to suggest those methods of disposal.

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I recognise that there is a problem here. Organisations from the National Farmers Union to Keep Britain Tidy, which the hon. Lady referenced, strongly support “bag it and bin it”. Anything that detracts from that could cause confusion and undermine the essence of the issue, which is that we want dog owners to act responsibly, in the way that she describes. Does she think that we can have both messages?

[Mrs Main]

I have done quite a lot of radio interviews on this today, and that is the tension. That is why signage is important. We should have easily recognisable graphics, because then people could see that there is somewhere to put the poo bags and that the poo will be collected. There is no point in bagging poo and then hunting in vain for a bin. That is when it gets lobbed.

We have to work with human nature. “Bag it and bin it” is one thing, but although that is the ideal solution, it is not the only one. I would like to expand on that. We need to look at Natural England’s “Countryside Code”, which is authorised by the Government to enhance comments on dog poo in the various situations that walkers find themselves in. The hon. Gentleman is quite right: that code says

“always clean up after your dog and get rid of the mess responsibly—‘bag it and bin it’.”

That is a simple message. Unfortunately, as I showed the Minister before the debate—I am happy to show other people—that simple message is clearly not working. It works a lot of the time, but if someone picks up their dog poo bag, feels that they do not know what to do with it and then lobs it, that is a far worse scenario. Deer and cattle are ingesting the plastic bags. We must tackle that.

Part of the issue is about education. Dogs Trust is working with a pet provider, running education classes for brownies, guides, scouts and so on to try to educate the dog owners of the future. This is a relatively new phenomenon: we did not use to have dog poo bags.

Bangladesh

Debate between Anne Main and Jim Fitzpatrick

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you, Sir Alan, presiding over business this afternoon. I look forward to hearing the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) respond to the debate. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main), the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Bangladesh, for leading the group with distinction and enthusiasm. She knew that I was thinking of challenging her for the chair but I thought that would be churlish, given how well she has led us for five years. I probably could not have beaten her, anyway, so that was entirely fatuous on my part. I am delighted she secured this debate and pleased that the title refers to the future of Bangladesh. That is very much what we all want to see, although she also covered the history, as have other speakers.

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field). He is my neighbour and friend. In this debate we are all friends because we are all friends of Bangladesh. We may be in different parties but we all want the best for that country. I know we all agree, as other speakers have touched on, that it is not our role to play sides in Bangladesh. We are not supporters of the Awami League or of the Bangladesh Nationalist party. Whichever party—BNP or Awami League—has won the support of the Bangladeshi people, I and colleagues have supported the Government of Bangladesh.

The right hon. Gentleman made some pertinent points about some political organisations in Bangladesh, in particular Jamaat-e-Islami. That is the sister organisation of the Islamic Forum of Europe, which has such a bad influence on our young people in the UK. Jamaat has been an ally of the Awami League in previous elections, though in more recent years has been associated with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. That is disturbing because, as has been referred to, Bangladesh has a proud secular history.

Another matter already raised is that of the violence against minority communities. I know the Bangladesh Government want to do more to protect minority communities. We want to see them redouble those efforts because those attacks are deeply disturbing for a country that was founded as a secular democracy. I criticised the Awami League for boycotting the last BNP election victory and I criticised the BNP when it boycotted elections two years ago. Many of us thought the BNP could have won that election and I thought the boycott was completely wrong.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) referred to confidence in the electoral process. The UK, the European Union, the United States and international organisations have a huge role to play in rebuilding the confidence within Bangladesh about transitional arrangements and the confidence in elections. The UK Government played a huge role in validating the electoral roll in Bangladesh, where 80 million voters were registered in 18 months. That demonstrated that we should have confidence in the electoral structures and arrangements within Bangladesh for future elections. There is a lot of pressure to accelerate the elections, and they have got to be timed to have the confidence of the international community as well as of the Bangladeshi people, so that the outcome will be respected internally and externally.

We all know, and reference has been made to the fact, that Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world, and it is one of the most vulnerable to climate change. Although its people are among the poorest in the world, it has had 6% growth for the past five to 10 years—a growth rate we would all bite their hands off for. That is not a criticism of the UK Government’s economic plan, although we all know it is not working that well, notwithstanding what the Conservatives say, but we would all love a 6% growth rate.

One side product of that growth, of course, was the disaster at the Rana Plaza. The acceleration in growth has meant that the regulation and protection of workers, wages and conditions have fallen behind. It was therefore reassuring to read an email this week from GreenGrade, an organisation the hon. Member for St Albans invited to make a presentation to the all-party group last year. GreenGrade, which helps garment workers and garment factory owners to improve the industry’s standing, says that

“Rana Plaza workers will get full compensation”

and that the donor trust fund, which was set up by the ILO,

“has reached its US $30 million target”

this year. Victims and families will therefore get compensation.

Colleagues will know that I am patron of the Sreepur village orphanage, which has been running in Bangladesh for 25 years. I am proud that it has helped a whole number of children who were made orphans by the Rana Plaza disaster. They have been housed, and they are being looked after. Clearly, a lot of good is coming out of a very tragic story.

[Mrs Main]

The hon. Gentleman is being a little too modest: the Sreepur office is run by his wife, who is absolutely fabulous—she came to make a presentation to the all-party group. I pay tribute to the efforts of the hon. Gentleman and his wife in rescuing children from the exploitation they may have been drawn into as a result of Rana Plaza.

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

It is very generous of the hon. Lady to mention my wife, who is a trustee of the orphanage. It was set up by Pat Kerr, who was born in Scotland and who was a cabin crew member with British Airways. The orphanage now looks after 500 children and 150 destitute mums. It has looked after women and children for the past 25 years, and it is a huge success story. It goes from strength to strength, and it has a lot of support in the House, including from the hon. Lady.

I want to refer quickly to elections. As I said, we need to build confidence in the electoral process. Accusations have been made about corruption and fraud. The right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster touched lightly on the fact that we in Tower Hamlets are not unused to corruption and fraud—our mayor was recently taken out by the election court. However, it was great to see Sheikh Hasina here this week giving commitments on the drive to rebuild confidence in the electoral process and institutions. Incidentally, it was also great to see her niece, my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), make her impressive maiden speech yesterday. She will be a real asset to not only the Labour party, but the whole House in due course. The Prime Minister of Bangladesh is rightly proud of her.