Examination of Witnesses (Questions 35-39)
11 MARCH 2004
MR ALAN
WOODS
Chairman: Welcome, Mr Woods, and thank
you for your time and also for the teenage dirtbag document. I
can help you with this because I happen to know that this is the
title of a popular song by the eminent American band Wheatus!
Thank you also for the other help and assistance you have provided
to Members of Parliament in the substantial information pack,
which I for one found extremely useful.
Q35 Mr Thomas: I want to start with the
Local Environmental Quality Survey of England, which you produced
for the second time and of which you gave us a synopsis in your
evidence. Although this is only for England, I do not suppose
Wales is much different, from what I have seen of it. It is rather
discouraging that 97% of 10,000 sites, and that is a large survey,
were still being littered. Although this is only the second year
that you have done a survey like this, on a broader perspective,
can you give us an idea of the trends that you see as an environmental
charity around things like litter, graffiti and so forth?
Mr Woods: As established in the
report, it does seem that generally the issue is the same as last
year, which is basically that the trend is unsatisfactory. Over
the years, we would say there has been an increase in certain
elements, which have made the position worse. One only has to
think of the rise of fast food litter, which leapt up within the
two years of this survey. We have had a whole range of different
activities about eating on the street in the past 15 to 20 years
that just was not there before. A whole kind of grazing mentality
has happened. There has been a rise in chewing gum sales. The
Wrigley company has spent £20 million in advertising their
product, which has obviously had an effect in so far as there
are now 26 million gum-chewers in the UK, which I do not suppose
was there 15 or 20 years ago. Once you start having the amount
of opportunities that there are now for people to be on the street,
the rise of the night time economy, which of course has been promoted
by many city centres for regeneration, and rightly so, there does
seem now to be more opportunity for people to commit crimes in
terms of local environmental quality issues or other anti-social
behaviour acts.
Q36 Mr Thomas: My garden is full of McDonald's
papers because there is a McDonald's at the bottom of the hill
where I live. I am always amazed that people can keep the paper
until they get to my garden. I would have eaten the food half
way up the hill. They must be doing it deliberately, perhaps with
a political motive! Accepting those things, certainly the increase
in fast food wrappers, which we all see very visibly, and the
spread of rubbish into very remote rural areas as well, means
that obviously urban rubbish reaches parts of the countryside
it never reached before. In your survey you found also that there
were some statistical movements that perhaps might be of interest
to the Committee. For example, you found that dog fouling had
gone down quite substantially by 27%. You suggest that may have
been to do with Ricky Tomlinson and sitting on a toilet somewhere.
I am not sure what effect that has! Is that down to things like
public awareness, is it down to specific strategies in specific
areas by specific authorities, or is it down to a wider cultural
change? Dog fouling, for example, is now more associated with
the public directly with Toxocara and its effects on children,
whereas dropping litter and dropping chewing gum is not associated
with any health problems?
Mr Woods: It is a bit of both
really. The difference between Louse Casey's evidence and my evidence
to this Committee is that so far Louise Casey has been dealing
with the consequences of that behaviour having happened and wanting
to confront people with their own personal social responsibility,
and we are trying to do that from the other hand; we are trying
to change people's behaviour at the very beginning. We ran the
dog fouling campaign. I think it is now socially unacceptable
for people to allow their dog to foul without clearing up—and
there has been a significant change—whereas 15 years ago
that would not have been the case. Obviously there are people
who do allow their dog to foul. We did try to understand what
the trigger was for them to change their behaviour. You are absolutely
right to focus on toxocariasis and blindness. The amount of toxocariasis
infection is probably an under-reported fact within the general
population of the UK because it is masked by a whole range of
different symptoms. It seems quite obvious to us that you should
start to promote the fact that that is a consequence of dog fouling
and then target the campaigns and run public information awareness
campaigns around the parks where people take their dogs. Instead
of having a bland message like "Don't drop litter" or
"Keep Britain Tidy", you now have to go in and target
the specific groups perpetrating the problem. Hence, we have just
sent out that report about teenage activity because teenagers
have no cognisance of their local environment. That is completely
different from us as adults; we do have quite a high acuity rate
of what is happening in our local patch. I have a 14-year old
and my house is clean but he will not maintain cleanliness within
the house because he is just not aware of his own local environment.
There are some differences between various groups. This is about
making the message relevant to individuals by trying to classify
them as groups and trying to bring about the most appropriate
behaviour change you can. I think some form of campaigning is
really very relevant, as well as putting strategies at the other
end to clean up after the act.
Q37 Mr Thomas: What about specific legislative
strategies? Thinking of my own area, dog fouling is now outlawed
by byelaws in more areas that ever before. Has that had a direct
impact, in your experience?
Mr Woods: Yes. We find that people
just do not believe they are ever going to get caught, whether
it is dropping litter or allowing their dog to foul. Of course,
with some of the present issues—and Ms Casey talked about
the increase in the police, community support officers and the
neighbourhood wardens teams—if there is a perception that
people will be caught, then there is a reduction in that type
of behaviour. Fixed penalty notices started to increase this year
because local authorities have been able to keep the receipts
from those fixed penalty notices. Before that, the money went
to Gordon Brown in the Treasury, which was fine but it was never
seen as something with which local authorities should become involved.
There was no real relevance or incentive for them to do so, but
we have seen a decline in fining. Now that there has been this
legislative change and local authorities keep the receipts from
the fixed penalty notices, there has been a dramatic difference.
Q38 Paul Flynn: I am grateful to you
for this publication, which has educated me in so far as I now
know I'm Just a Teenage Dirt Bag, Baby! is a song by Wheatus,
which has greatly illuminated my cultural life! This is a depressing
document in some ways. You make two points in it: young people
are interested in cleanliness, order and so on, but they are also
greatly attracted to crapness, as you describe it, and disorder;
and they are predisposed, particularly when they go out with their
mates, not to put their chip wrappers into a bin—it seems
to me they are a bit wimpish—but they have to throw them
in the most troublesome place possible. What is your conclusion?
You have tried this. Your view would be helpful to us.
Mr Woods: We have received grant
aid from Defra and we are going to campaign to youth during this
next year in some quite significant ways. I can put that into
the context of some of the campaigns that are run on youth advertising
now. We are trying to change behaviour and so we will be using
TV advertisements over this coming year to try and pick up on
some of those issues to try and change behaviour, but it cannot
be a simple "Don't" message.
Q39 Paul Flynn: We have seen so many
campaigns which have been counterproductive or useless in most
cases in trying to change people's behaviour. How can campaigns
compete with the peer pressure on young people?
Mr Woods: There is something in
this issue about cleanliness, about the whole personal hygiene
issue. If you look at this, and there is a survey in Sugar
magazine today about the cleanliness of teenagers and things affecting
them, you can make these issues link to some very personal things
and the angst of growing up as a teenager. We are hoping to latch
on to that and to say that littering is low level rebellion and
it is not very cool to do it. We start immediately to fall into
the trap of using words like "cool". To the teenager,
it is just the most awful thing to do. You have got to start using
things like the Tango adverts. Some of the advertisements directed
at kids are very subtle and complex, comedy-type messages, and
that is going to make the trustees of my charity very nervy. We
are going to have to go out and do something which is a bit different
as opposed to preaching to them and saying, "Don't do it".
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