Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-09
Topic: Law and Crime
Mark Schreiber (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I have no problem at all in supporting this amendment; I have for a long while campaigned on this issue. In fact, in July 2013 I introduced a Private Member’s Bill on littering from vehicles. It did not get anywhere at the time but, as quite often happens with Private Members’ Bills, the idea was incorporated into subsequent legislation, and it is now possible to fine the owner of a vehicle from which litter is dropped without identifying the person who dropped it. Previously, anonymity or a dispute as to who dropped the litter meant nothing ever happened There is a real problem in this, of both littering and, more seriously, fly-tipping. There is a distinction between the two, because littering is one of those anti-social things where people probably do not feel a great moral obligation not to do it; it is often thoughtlessness and they do not feel it is a moral point. Fly-tipping is another matter. It is a criminal activity, often deliberately undertaken by people who, as it were, make a profession of it. They offer to dispose of goods and household waste for people for a fee, and then they ruthlessly and callously fly-tip it In answer to both these problems, I am not sure we need new legislation—if the Bill can in some way strengthen existing legislation, so much the better—but we need proper enforcement. If we take the first example, of littering from a vehicle, practically nobody does anything about it. It ought to be possible for wardens to take the number of a vehicle and issue fines on the spot, perfectly happily, rather like a parking offence. It is not a criminal offence, but it is a stiff enough fine that you simply do not do it again—once you have paid £80 or £100 for dropping a pack from your hamburger outside, you will not do it again. Fly-tipping is much more serious, and I think proper prosecution is needed here. This is basically already the responsibility of local authorities, which in general they do not fulfil for various reasons, one of which is—I am afraid to say—that they sometimes know who is behind it all: criminal elements they fear to upset. Sometimes it is for less obvious reasons Where I am from, in Suffolk, we had five examples of fly-tipping one particular moment and we were able, with the help of the local authority, to pick up the litter. The people responsible were foolish enough to identify themselves and exactly where they came from, and there was no doubt about it. When the local authorities approached them, they merely said that they had paid someone, who had paid someone, to do it. When we asked if the authorities would prosecute, we were told it was too sensitive That is not good enough. There is a very simple answer to fly-tipping: the size of the fine should be a multiple of the cost of taking litter to an authorised litter dump. At the moment it is less; it is cheaper to pay the fine on the rare occasion that one is issued than to pay for a truck or the cost of going to the dump. The remedy is perfectly simple. It is a community problem; it is for the community to enforce it. It should be enforced primarily through local government, but central government, through Bills such as this, can do something to stiffen up the action taken I have talked only about litter. I agree that there are other problems from access, but private littering and criminal littering in the form of fly-tipping are the main problems. They are very serious.