Baroness Maddock
Main Page: Baroness Maddock (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)My Lords, I will make two comments in the gap. I declare that I am a vice-chancellor of the Local Government Association. I know that local councils take this very seriously. In fact, 73% of residents are satisfied with the way their councils deal with litter. However, they need to be even better at it. My experience as a councillor and a trainer of councillors over the years has shown that voters judge their council on the state of the streets. If the streets are messy and unkempt, they think that that is how the council is run. Therefore that is definitely in councils’ interests. I can recommend what Sutton council did. When it started off one of its campaign—they have been elected as Lib Dems year after year—they displayed a big mountain of litter, which was what they had collected in a day, and told the voters that it had cost £4 million to collect.