Examination of Witnesses (Questions 167-179)
5 FEBRUARY 2004
COUNCILLOR SIR
DAVID WILLIAMS,
MR PHIL
DAVIES, MR
SIMON BAXTER,
DR LEITH
PENNY AND
MR PETER
LARGE
Q167 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you
for coming. We have a substantial cast of witnesses and, since
we have quite a lot of ground to cover, I would be very grateful
if you could do your best to keep the answers as short and sweet
as possible. We have now heard from the Environment Agency and
from the Magistrates' Association and they have told us that they
believe that the criminal justice system is there to punish and
to deter. How well do you think that this criminal justice system
is working in relation to environmental crimes?
Cllr Sir David Williams: Not very
well. If I may, Chairman, I wanted to make a very short opening
comment which comes to the point you have just made. The experts
in the four local council offices who are here on this will answer
your detailed questions, not me, but I have five very brief points
to make. First of all, environmental crime is a very wide-ranging
area, as you are fully aware, from litter to major pollution.
Secondly, it relates to many priority aims of local authorities,
particularly sustainable development and environmental improvement.
Thirdly, as you say, it is intended to detect and prosecute but
a lot of these offences can be difficult to detect and can be
difficult to prosecute. Fourthly, there is increasing public expectation
around the whole area of environmental crime as it affects individuals.
We have people in my borough in Richmond upon Thames who have
invested many hundreds of thousands of pounds in a high quality
of life, and they are quite vociferous and active in wanting to
see their quality of life protected, and I do not have to tell
members of Parliament that any more than local councillors. We
also have an increasing legislative framework with all of this;
the landfill tax is most obviously changing the whole game and
framework, therefore particularly as the fiscal effects come into
play there is an increasing temptation for people on the margins
of the law to save money, cut costs and break the law. On the
last point that you asked about specifically, the legal framework
is not just imposing penalties to fit the crime: more important
than that, and I think you will see this from the evidence we
will give, we have to have adequate deterrents within the legal
framework and until we make it, across the whole gamut of environmental
crime, seriously unpleasant to be caught committing offences and
on an escalating basis then we will never get on top of this,
because the problem is getting worse because everything else is
increasing, as I have said. That is just, if you like, an opener
for your question; I think we are largely going to be talking
around that but with a lot of detail in response to whatever questions
you want to ask.
Q168 Chairman: That is a very helpful
opening statement, thank you, and we will proceed to tease out
a little more on almost everything you have said. Can I begin
by asking you about the perception that environmental crime is
a growing menace? You seemed to imply just then that this had
something to do with the changing legislative framework. Do you
think it also has something to do with the fact that there is
more environmental crime around than there was perhaps in previous
years?
Mr Baxter: On perception, in some
areas people do see it as a growing problem and in others not.
For example, you might get an area that is quite wealthy and that
does not suffer too much from enviro crime, be it fly-posting
or an abandoned vehicle, but when they do see it they will report
it and know there is something wrong. On the 14th floor of a housing
estate, bags thrown out of the 13th floor, abandoned vehicle,
graffiti, the perception is slightly different and it is the challenge
for local authorities to begin to overcome that in creative and
innovative ways, sometimes in ways that may be slightly sexy.
That is how we tackled it in Southwark when we tried to change
that mindset. These are the same people who will not be bothered
with recycling, so it is making those links and also the links
with other forms of crime and that is important as well. I have
got some video footage of a vehicle that was abandoned, untaxed,
in quite good condition, which within four days was filled up
with rubbish, windows smashed and set alight by some arsonists,
so the links are quite clear between an enviro crime ending up
in some other form of crime.
Dr Penny: Environmental crime
has always been with us as a general phenomenon but what happens
are the particular sorts of antisocial environmental activity
occur in response to change of circumstances or sometimes genuine
innovation. Examples would be the rise in street urination in
central London because of the growth in the night time economy;
with abandoned vehicles the problem grows and shrinks in line
with the prices you get from scrap; fly-tipping increases because
of the impact of the landfill tax. Examples of genuinely new environmental
crimes are 15 years ago the appearance of prostitutes' cards in
telephone boxes as an example of entrepreneurial innovation, and
more recently commercial graffiti, graffiti being used as part
of a systematic advertising campaign. So I think it helps to look
at individual issues rather than environmental crime across the
piece.
Q169 Chairman: We will be doing that.
In fact, this is the opening of an inquiry into a series of specific
areas but our focus in this particular inquiry is on the penalty
system, magistrates and the law as it stands and the adequacy,
or otherwise, of that. Coming back to what you think is the greatest
obstacle that you face in dealing with this type of crime? Is
it finding the culprit, for example? Is it the fact that the penalty
regime is not sufficiently stringent? Are there other factors
that make it hard for you to cost? What is the greatest obstacle
that you have?
Cllr Sir David Williams: It is
different with each type of environmental crime but I think the
handicap of the penalty regime is probably the greatest—
Q170 Chairman: You mean inadequate sentencing
power?
Mr Baxter: To an extent. If you
do catch someone, it depends on the type of enviro crime. An eight
wheeler being driven by an individual may have a false driving
licence and the vehicle may or may not be registered and if it
is registered it may not be to the correct address, so there are
some challenges around that. However, when you do catch those
individuals they go before the courts and say to the courts, "I
am unemployed" or "I am self-employed and because of
this I have now lost my job", but the reality is tomorrow
he will be out with another firm. He gets £500 costs for
£20,000 worth of damage, and the courts need to explore their
situation slightly more creatively in punishing that individual.
I understand, "You cannot pay Mr X. You are unemployed but
what I would like you to do is go and clear the graffiti off for
the next six months". If they have not got the ability to
pay, then they should be punished in another way. The chances
of the £500 being collected is sometimes questionable so
that is a slight frustration, but generally I do not think local
authorities should be put off. I have seen in other authorities
that they see this commitment and they do want to tackle it, but
we would like the support of the courts because it is very hit
and miss—and that is again quite regional. You can have
a good relationship with a Magistrates' court and they will support
you, but in other areas that is not always the case.
Q171 Chairman: We want to have a look
at sentencing in more detail in a moment or two, but on a wider
front can I just ask whether you think that one of the problems
is that environmental crime is often not perceived as a crime
like other crimes. You said, Mr Baxter, that it can obviously
lead on to other types of crime. Do you think there is a perception
that environmental crime does not matter very much, both on the
part of people who commit it and on the part of people there to
prosecute it, and on the part of people there to hand out sentences?
That it sort of does not really matter?
Mr Baxter: Again, there are varying
degrees. If you have an individual who has dumped their settee
and sofas near a park, when they are caught they do understand
that it is wrong and in most cases will apologise for that, but
you have the professionals, including the professional fly-posting
companies and fly-tippers, who do not give a damn and clearly
something needs to be done about that. It is frustrating that
when you get these people before the court they spin some yarn
and the courts believe that, and I just think the sentencing needs
to be adjusted to the crime and it gets back to that. I hope that
answers your question.
Cllr Sir David Williams: I would
support that. Having seen a summary of what the Magistrates' Association
said to you I was a bit disappointed because you do have to take
the means of the accused into account but you also have to try
and make sure that you have a deterrence framework as well. Seizing
vehicles for persistent fly-tippers you could even have, as Simon
and I were discussing before coming in, some sort of windscreen
disc which is a licence to dump under whatever Act it may be so
that when you stop a vehicle you have a good chance of saying,
"You have not got a disc on the window, why is this in the
back of your truck?". That evens up the odds. Westminster
is particularly aggressive about fly-posting perhaps because they
have the worst problem—this is commercial fly-posting, not
just garden fetes and that sort of thing.
Chairman: We read the excellent memorandum
from Westminster with great interest.
Q172 Mr Thomas: Following on from this,
I wondered about the cultural values concerning environmental
crime. What sort of level of reporting do you understand comes
around an environmental crime? Are you very reliant on the public
informing you as local authorities very often on areas that are
not your responsibility, where they are contacting you first because
maybe they can find your phone number in the phone book easier
than others, or you are the local councillor, or something like
that?
Dr Penny: I think the answer is
"Yes" to both halves of that question. We run in Westminster
a 7 day 24 hour telephone line where members of the public can
ring in with any issue of environmental concern, and we get a
large volume of referrals through that route, but we also employ
in total some 54 field staff who are again deployed across a 24
hours 7 days week who also generate proactively a great deal of
work. Of course, the aim is to get to the problem before the customer
does.
Q173 Mr Thomas: Just to take Westminster
as an example, if I may, are you dealing with environmental
crime or dealing with the fruits of it, as it were, that are not
your statutory responsibilities, and are there cost implications
for local authorities in dealing with a gamut of complaints, things
that are happening in the area that you have no enforcement abilities
over?
Dr Penny: The costs are enormous.
Obviously deploying 54 uniformed staff does not come cheap and,
just to give you some idea of the scale of the costs, the total
client operation at Westminster, all the officers who are involved
in enforcing various forms of street-based environmental regulation
and running the cleansing service that deals with the aftermath,
is about £3 million, and the contract cost for cleaning the
streets and taking away rubbish is currently £32 million,
and both of those costs would be obviously significantly less
if we had less environmental crime to deal with.
Q174 Mr Thomas: In your evidence which
focused a lot on the fly-posting aspect, you say there that you
spent £400,000 a year on dealing with fly-posting and graffiti.
Would that include as well the prosecuting costs of offenders,
or is that a regulatory cost?
Dr Penny: That figure is the total
budget that includes the costs of the officers who do the work,
the costs of legal cases, the costs of the educational promotional
work we do, as well as the actual cost of the contractors that
we employ to clear sites and to apply preventative treatments.
Q175 Mr Thomas: So it is slightly wider
than just the prosecution and so forth, but it does take into
account the effects of environmental crime in the area?
Dr Penny: Yes.
Mr Davies: In terms of enforcement
we have a dedicated team of ten officers on environmental crime
enforcement. We also will have from 1 April 75 community wardens,
all of which are to undertake enforcement action for enviro crimes
so we will have 85 uniformed officers around the borough. The
ten officers currently have a budget in terms of salary and promotional
work akin to what Westminster are doing of about £400,000.
On top of that the community wardens, which are not just about
enviro crime but about reassurance and social behaviour generally,
will have a budget of £3.46 million, so that is the investment
the council has made. Add to that only two of the schemes from
1 April 2004 are government funded with the remainder council
funded, with antisocial behaviour at the top of the priorities
of our administration, therefore the investment they are putting
in reflects their desire to change behaviour and perception.
Cllr Sir David Williams: This
is seriously expensive for local councils.
Q176 Mr Thomas: Do you have an idea of
average costs around local authorities?
Cllr Sir David Williams: I do
not but I am sure we can provide it to you.
Chairman: That would be very helpful.
Q177 Mr Thomas: Following on from that,
asking the inevitable, how do the costs you have been talking
about, which have been in the millions, compare with what you
see in terms of financial penalties being placed on the offenders?
Cllr Sir David Williams: They
may be adequate on the first penalty, but there is a seriously
inadequate escalation of all this—a lack of recognition
by the courts that, as I said before, you have to have deterrence.
When you get somebody going to court for fly-tipping for the third
or fourth time and they get the same standard fine which is a
small fraction of the amount of money they have gained by fly-tipping
and not disposing of the stuff legally, that is not only wrong
in principle but very frustrating for local councils, and only
encourages the crime.
Q178 Mr Thomas: So we are not talking
here about harming the householder who for the first time dumps
their grass clippings in the wrong place, but people who are constantly
before the courts?
Mr Davies: Turning that on its
head, I think one of the questions could be by how much have the
cleansing budgets of the various authorities gone up in the last
five years, and has the incidence of fly-tipping and dumping reduced,
and I know from the Southwark perspective it has not. Waste on
the streets is growing regrettably and forms and instances of
enviro crime are not standing still but increasing. Despite the
financial effort from our point of view of nearly £4 million
from next year and obviously a considerable amount of money from
Westminster and from around the country, because it is not just
ourselves, we are not stopping the enviro crime being undertaken,
and therefore it gives you the impression that the deterrents
the courts are putting on for people perpetrating these crimes
are not sufficient to stop them and discourage others from doing
so. Certainly the cleansing budgets are going up across London
and the country, so that might be an issue for you to look at
as well.
Cllr Sir David Williams: Also,
the legal, environmental and commercial background can make a
significant difference. For instance, on abandoned vehicles, when
I was first a councillor over twenty years ago I had a bloke I
knew and I had a wonderful reputation for getting rid of abandoned
vehicles in my ward, because I knew "Fred". I could
get hold of him, and he would get rid of the abandoned vehicles
and I got a lot of votes for that, probably! That was when there
was a market for recycling vehicles. The police used him, and
even on one occasion protected him when he took a vehicle away
that was a mess but was not abandoned, but there is no market
now for abandoned vehicles—although it may change as these
things do. Every London borough now removes abandoned vehicles
free. It is completely counter-productive trying to charge, although
legally that is what we have been able to do, because if you do
charge the vehicles are dumped, and if you leave them in the street
for a week they are a much more expensive problem to remove, so
it is quite a subtle problem getting rid of abandoned vehicles
quickly, and ruinously expensive too.
Mr Baxter: Coming back to who
reports these things, it is a collective responsibility. It is
proactive and reactive, we have a call centre and have monitoring
that goes on, but it should not be just within one section of
the council; it should be over-arching. If you work in social
services you should be reporting abandoned vehicles, aggressive
begging, fly-posting and graffiti; and if you work in housing
you should have the same school of thought. It is everyone's responsibility
to tackle this problem. If you see an abandoned vehicle do not
think, "Environment has not moved it"; think "I
am going to report it, I am going to take a picture". That
is what we are trying to engender in Southwark, and ideally throughout
the community we want a street leader scheme that tries to do
that as well.
Cllr Sir David Williams: You have
to mobilise the community because it is ton their benefit and
they need to know that and they need to be actively involved.
Q179 Mr Thomas: On that question you
mentioned earlier that you had seen the Magistrates' Association
evidence to the Committee. They hinted that local authorities
are only now starting to get their act together on environmental
crime, and we have seen some of the ideas happening in terms of
cross-compliance, as it were, and getting all the different parts
of local authorities involved, which is something we would all
welcome. What was your reaction to that sort of suggestion that
maybe not just the magistrates but all of us have not really been
treating this with enough thought and seriousness until now?
Cllr Sir David Williams: I am
sure there are cases where local authorities could have taken
this more aggressively and more seriously, but the impression
that I was left with from the summary I read of the Magistrates'
Association evidence was that it was rather defensive. Like you
get in local government in the more timid areas where they fall
back on section something subsection something else and so on—it
is the challenge of how to deal with something, not feeling the
comfort of some bit of obscure legislation that the public or
council might have heard of. What is Westminster's experience
of Magistrates?
|
