Litter

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in a debate initiated by my noble friend Lord Cormack, because a cause espoused by my noble friend is a cause espoused with passion. The problem of litter, refuse and fly-tipping, as any local councillor knows, often arouses more passion than the European Union or anything else; it is a matter of real concern to many people. At the very beginning of my speech I pay tribute to what I regard as the unsung heroes: the street cleaners. I live in London, and without them this place would be engulfed in a mountain of rubbish. As many noble Lords have said, many thousands of people—including myself and, I imagine, everyone speaking in this debate—spend part of their time in their locality or street picking up rubbish, going through the countryside with a black bag and filling it up. Therefore a lot of people in this country do a great deal to try to repair the horrors caused by litter.

I will focus mainly on towns and cities. My first point is to ask, why does this matter? It matters because it affects the environment in which we live. When you see food, cans and rubbish it affects the whole mood and nature of people’s lives, and they lose pride in their neighbourhoods. It matters for health reasons. The amount of food that is dropped—chicken, hamburgers and sandwiches—attracts rats, urban foxes and pigeons, so there is a health hazard as well. We know that litter attracts litter. If you leave litter anywhere, people automatically think that that is a rubbish dump and will just put more there.

How have we got to this state? If we look at some of the reasons why, we might find some of the solutions. Firstly, there is the stigma of dropping litter, which noble Lords and the noble Countess mentioned, looking back at the past. We were told as children that to drop even a sweet wrapper was the wrong thing to do, but that stigma has gone. I ask myself, how can we begin to educate people in a new way? One of the most interesting things about schools is that when children at a very young age are taught about the evils of smoking or about what is happening to our environment, they go home and tell their parents not to smoke and to worry about climate change. Therefore we have to ask how we can use schools to educate children. I wonder about some of the ideas that are happening in some places; schools might adopt a local street and go round collecting the litter, and a local company could sponsor that activity, promoting it on litter bins or in other ways so that the school and the company gain credit for that. That would be one way in which children could actively engage in litter collection.

There is a lack of ownership. As noble Lords have said, people think that it is somebody else’s problem. One thing we could also do is perhaps to follow an example from Germany and begin to emphasise to retail and food outlets that they have a responsibility to look after their premises. Many single traders do that already—they take real pride—but a lot more could happen. I hope that the Minister will at least give me hope that he might consider that possibility.

I will end with a very strong plea—this debate has given me the chance to do that. I live in London, and many of us travel on the Underground. A huge amount of food is left on the Tube. McDonald’s may be doing many things in its retail outlets, but not a day passes when you go on to a Tube train and immediately you can smell that someone is eating a McDonald’s. They will have a grease-soaked bag, placed on seats on which people will be sitting, and there will be sandwiches, food dripping with mayonnaise—which gets all over the place. Presumably, at the end of the line, the terrific workers on the Underground have to clear it; not just the newspapers, which are left at the end of every rush hour, morning and night, but also the food, coffee, and all the rest. I end with a very strong plea for London Underground to look at this very carefully.