Littering From Vehicles Outside London (Keepers: Civil Penalties) Regulations 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-02-01
Topic: Law and Crime
Mark Schreiber (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, obviously I welcome this very small step in the battle against litter and I am most grateful to my noble friend for introducing it. There are several lessons in it. It has taken an awfully long time. This requirement was introduced in the then Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, which received Royal Assent on 18 March 2014—so it is now nearly four years old. That must be nearly a record for slowness in complying with the will of Parliament. It is, of course, a long way from the record of 10 years achieved when I persuaded this House, when I first arrived here, to introduce a requirement for an electronic central register of firearms. It was 10 years before that happened. The department did not like it and decided to ignore it for as long as it could. I had support from all parties and 10 years later it happened. That was about 12 years ago and it works extremely well—but that is beside the point I suspect the reason the department has delayed this provision for so long is that neither the Home Office nor the environment department wanted it. Eventually I obtained help from the then Home Secretary—now my right honourable friend the Prime Minister—and the then excellent Environment Secretary, the right honourable Owen Paterson, who personally intervened. Indeed, my noble friend the present Chief Whip of your Lordships’ House was the Minister who put it into practice—for which I am extremely grateful. But it has taken an awfully long time. The essence of this is that for a long while it has been a criminal offence to throw litter out of a car—but nothing is ever done about it because you have to prove who threw the litter I pay tribute to CPRE, of which I was chairman for five years some years ago, for campaigning for this measure from 2008. It will operate like a parking offence. If I lend you my car and you park it in the wrong place, I will get the parking ticket. That is sensible. There is no dispute and I can then, I hope, get the money back from you. Another plus of these regulations is that they decriminalise this offence. Previously, it was a criminal offence, which was virtually never successfully prosecuted. Now it is a civil offence with a civil penalty, which I hope will work. The penalty is actually very low. We have heard about the £100 basic penalty. This can go up if people do not pay it and can be halved if they pay it quickly. It is a small sum The Minister referred in particular to proportionality. It is important to administer this penalty proportionately. We do not want to discredit it by applying it to someone throwing a matchstick out of a car; we want to catch people who throw out containers, Big Mac packs and all that stuff. Another way of tackling this, which I hope the Government will soon introduce, is to bring in rules about deposits on returnable containers. This was introduced in the United States 30 years ago, originally in Oregon, and works very well because when the affluent discard these containers the less affluent pick them up and hand them into shops to collect the money.