London Local Authorities Bill
25th January 2012
During a debate on street litter control notices, Anne Main opposes new legislation that would make owners of retail or commercial buildings responsible for litter dropped outside their premises. She says that authorities should target the person not the premises.
ANNE'S INTERVENTIONS IN THE DEBATE
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con): Does my hon. Friend believe that litter such as dropped cigarettes and chewing gum is covered by existing regulation and local authority powers?
Philip Davies: That is correct. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch touched on that in his speech—he omitted to mention other things that I shall discuss today—and expressed the view that the clause was a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) is right: there are plenty of other regulations that could apply.
Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con): To help my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main), the current regulations do not apply to public buildings. Retail and commercial buildings are covered, but public buildings are not, and the purpose of the provision is to extend coverage to them.
Philip Davies: I am sure we are all grateful for that clarification. The point I think my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans was making and I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch would have made were he here is that people who smoke outside a building and deposit their litter on the street are guilty of an offence under existing provisions, without the Bill coming into play, and can be prosecuted. He made the point that many places provide containers for smokers’ litter and that the problem, if it did exist, applied equally across the country and there was no justification for a London-only provision.
Mrs Main: The authorities in St Albans have always had the problem of not knowing exactly where the people who have dropped litter came from, but that is why they have always believed that, if they so chose, they could enforce litter regulations outside any premises. It is not necessary to see a person coming out of a premises. The local authority targeted the culprit—the person who dropped the litter—rather than the premises.
Philip Davies: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am sure she agrees that existing legislation is sufficient to tackle the problem.
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Mrs Main: Will my hon. Friend, or other hon. Members in the Chamber, suggest any offence that would not be covered by existing legislation, but which would be caught by the Bill?
Philip Davies: My hon. Friend makes a good point. This part of the Bill—indeed, the whole Bill, although I will not be diverted on to that, Madam Deputy Speaker, but will stick to the amendment and clause 5—exists for the convenience of local authority officials. That is the thrust of the provisions.
Mrs Main: My hon. Friend makes a powerful argument. I am listening with increasing concern because this appears to be nothing about solving a particular problem to do with offences; it is about cutting costs for local authorities, in which case, as my hon. Friend argues, it would apply nationwide. It appears that the rationale behind the clause is nothing to do with offences at all, but to do with cost-cutting.
Philip Davies: My hon. Friend might want to advance that argument, but I am not entirely clear whether the Bill is simply about cost-cutting. I know that that is what the hon. Member for Derby North would have us believe, but I think that it is slightly more sinister and that it is about the amount of powers to be given to local authorities and their officers.
Mrs Main: Is not the problem the fact that this would effectively carve up the streets in front of public buildings and ultimately make them responsible for the streets? Who can say whether a Mars bar wrapper—sorry, Mars!—lying on the street outside a theatre was dropped by someone going into the theatre having ejected it from their pocket, or someone coming out of the theatre having eaten it on the premises? The point is that the person who dropped the sweet wrapper is responsible for the litter, not the theatre, even though it is in front of the premises.
Philip Davies: My hon. Friend is right. She introduces a new aspect, because if we follow this through to the logical conclusion, it may not be the individual but the retailer who is responsible. And then perhaps we should go the whole hog and say that it is not the retailer who is responsible but Mars, because it put the product in a wrapper that could be dropped. My hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green may well be thinking about amending the Bill further so that retailers are not held responsible, but instead Mars would be held responsible for any Mars bar wrapper found anywhere on the streets of London, because it should not have produced a chocolate bar in a wrapper.
Mrs Main: I have to “fess up” and declare an interest: my husband worked for Mars for a long time, which is probably why the example sprang into my head. I in no way wish to imply that Mars bar wrappers—Snickers is also a Mars product—are more likely than other wrappers to end up on the floor.
Philip Davies: It was important for my hon. Friend to make that point, because otherwise she might have been in trouble tonight, and her endless supply of free Mars bars could have been at risk.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con): My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech about who is responsible for litter and its collection. Taking the principle that the polluter should pay, I trust that he will support the principle that the measures taken must punish those who drop litter in the first place.
Mrs Main: My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and many local authorities, my own included, are working on the issue positively in order to encourage people to stop smoking, given that it has now become more inconvenient to do so, and in order to consider what provision, such as bins, they can make so that people dispose of litter sensibly. Local authorities are already helping with the strategy; they do not need new legislation on the littering aspect.
Philip Davies: I absolutely agree.
Mrs Main: I am extremely interested to hear the Toowoomba and Braintree examples. Does my hon. Friend know whether the authorities in London have explored the idea of copying any of those examples before resorting to legislation? Is he aware of any pilot studies that have been carried out and evaluated which led them to the conclusion that the only way to solve this potential problem, which they perceive as a problem, is to encourage more regulation and legislation?
Philip Davies: I agree with my hon. Friend, who makes a good suggestion, and I am not aware of any local authorities in London having learned from those ideas or tried to apply them first. Perhaps the Bill’s sponsor can shed more light on that, but I certainly encourage them to use legislation as a last resort, because at the moment we are using it as a first resort, and there are plenty of examples of other measures working just as effectively, if not more so.
Mrs Main: Flushed with success, one might say. I sat on the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government when it produced a report on the provision of public lavatories. One of the recommendations, as I am sure my hon. Friend is aware, was that the 1963 Act should not only be upheld, but that, according to all the information the Committee received, it should be extended wherever possible. We recommended that all private premises, such as train stations, be encouraged to remove their turnstiles at the earliest opportunity. Anything that goes contrary to the recommendations of the 2008 Select Committee report would be retrograde.
Philip Davies: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North, she is clearly far more of an expert on public toilets than I am. I have no idea why the Select Committee decided that that was the most pressing matter to inquire into and report on. Perhaps she can enlighten me.
Mrs Main: I am more than happy to enlighten my hon. Friend. We received numerous submissions of evidence from people with disabilities and from organisations such as Help the Aged. People felt that the lack of access to good, well-functioning toilets often curtailed people’s right to fully access all aspects of life. Many groups said that it was vital to improve accessibility to toilets because, even under the current regulations, they did not feel that it was good enough.
Philip Davies: That is very helpful. I do not know whether the local authorities concerned or the sponsor of the Bill have read the evidence sessions or conclusions of that inquiry. I do not know whether they have spoken about this Bill with the groups that felt so strongly in that inquiry. I suggest that they should have done so before they even thought about bringing forward clause 6.
