UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 445-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Environmental audit COMMITTEE

(Sub-committee on environmental justice)

ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME: FLY-TIPPING, FLY-POSTING, LITTER, GRAFFITI AND NOISE

Thursday 11 MARCH 2004

MS LOUISE CASEY and MR WILL NIBLET

MR ALAN WOODS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 63

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee, Sub-Committee on Environmental Justice

on Thursday 11 March 2004

Members present

Mr Peter Ainsworth, in the Chair

Mr Colin Challen

Mrs Helen Clark

Paul Flynn

Mr Simon Thomas

________________

Memorandum submitted by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Louise Casey, National Director and Mr Will Niblet, Environmental Team, anti-Social Behaviour Unit, examined.

Q1 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to our sub-committee on the world of graffiti, litter, dog faeces, fly-posting and the general crapness of modern life. I want to put to you initially something that was said to us by Mr Kier Hopley, the Head of Sentencing Policy at the Home Office, at the end of the oral evidence session we had with him. He said: "To be absolutely honest, in terms of my day-to-day job and life, environmental crime is not at the forefront of my agenda." Does that not make your life a lot harder?

Ms Casey: Not really, no. He said environmental crime is not at the forefront because actually he is trying to sort out fixed penalty notices and how they work right across the entire country and deal with sentencing overall, and this is one part of it. There are other people, such as myself and colleagues in Defra, who worry about this a lot. These are not discordant, I do not think.

Q2 Chairman: They seem fairly discordant to me, given the salience which this issue has in local communities and the increasing prominence it is getting in the political debate at local level, and of course here as well. It is rather disappointing that the Home Office seems not to be taking this as seriously as many people in the community are.

Ms Casey: That is a different question. If the question was "Is the Home Office taking this issue seriously?", the answer is: absolutely, and across the Home Office they clearly are. Hence, Kier Hopley is responsible for sentencing policy to Ministers and on sentencing policy he has priorities, such as fixed penalty notices, community service orders, et cetera. That is his job; he is an official working for Ministers in a government department. The government department, the Home Office, does take this incredibly seriously. That is why I am here, I hope. It is also why many other people in the Home Office worry about this so much. Environmental crime is absolutely integral to the Government's agenda, not only on tacking anti-social behaviour but dealing with crime and grime: clean and safe, crime and grime are two halves of the same equation. If you had spoken to Eddie Roy, who is the Director responsible for crime reduction in the Home Office, she would have said to you quite a lot about how much it matters to her that crime reduction partnerships do prioritise what they are doing on environmental crime. Certainly in my work, which takes me out of Whitehall a great deal, it is absolutely evident to us that we are working very closely with local authorities and police authorities to get them to prioritise this issue. That is why the whole "Together" thrust of the campaign is about clean and safe, the crime and the grime. It is about trying to get communities to be able to have a bit more control, and the way they see control is often through the crime agenda. It is a huge issue for the Government and a huge issue therefore for the Home Office. If we gave you the wrong impression, then we can talk about that back at base camp!

Q3 Chairman: I think you gave the impression that you wanted to give. It was a frank answer to a straight question. Coming back to the Defra memorandum, which emphasises quite a lot the "broken widow" theory, do you think that current levels of anti-social behaviour are related to the overall standards of our local environment?

Ms Casey: There is no research or evidence that makes that link as clearly as I think people would like it to be, if I am honest. I am a signed-up member, as a member of the public, to the "broken window" theory because it seems logical to me personally. In terms of research and evidence, that link is not really made quite so clearly. The "broken window" theory is now 1970s; it is a good few decades ago. That does not mean to say, however, that it is not quite obvious to us that people, particularly in deprived areas, perceive anti-social behaviour to be a problem. They are six times more likely to see anti-social behaviour as a problem. The flip side of that is that people in more affluent areas complain much more about the sorts of issues that you are looking at today. I think there is something in that. This is not straightforward stuff. What is completely obvious is that the public care about this issue hugely, and therefore we need to make sure that we respond to it.

Q4 Chairman: When you say that the research bears out the "broken window" theory, are you saying that research has been done and no link has been established, or that there has not been a great deal of research?

Ms Casey: I am not an academic, a social scientist or a researcher. That is not what the Government is employing me to do, so you would have to get in whoever runs research to test all this out. What I do know is that I have read people saying that they do not agree with the "broken window" theory. I have read other people saying that they do.

Q5 Chairman: What is your view?

Ms Casey: My view is there is a connection, definitely.

Q6 Chairman: That is as a member of the public?

Ms Casey: Yes. In my job I go out to communities all the time. I spend a lot of my life listening to people who say that they are not only tired of these issues but they are tired of the issues because they see them on a continuum towards crime. You can look at this in two ways. Ten years ago MORI polling was showing that people worried about unemployment, whether they were going to be able to pay their mortgage and economic type issues. Now, if you talk to anybody, they will say that they worry about litter, graffiti and vandalism. We have to respond on that basis. I can only say, from all the visits and community meetings that I have attended, a huge number of people in the public say, "If you could only get on to of this, we would feel safer". When people feel safer, they are more likely not to commit crime, and they are also more likely, in my view, to report crime. I live in an area where some people gave up reporting abandoned cars because they did not think anybody was going to come and take the cars away. We are saying in government right now, and the "Together" campaign is all about this, working with colleagues in Defra and elsewhere, ENCAMS and others: come forward, and let us make more complaints about this and more noise about it. I think it is important. I think there is a link.

Q7 Chairman: Do you think that one of the quickest gains that could be made in tackling anti-social behaviour generally is by focusing on low-level crime?

Ms Casey: Yes. Anti-social behaviour quite often is low-level crime per se. Things like harassment, intimidation and those sorts of things are going to have a huge and detrimental effect on people. It makes people very miserable, it makes them ill and it does other things. I also think that living in an environment of litter, graffiti and glass all over the floor because somebody has done a bus shelter in is not exactly motivational. The sooner we can crack those sorts of things, the happier people will be and the less likely to commit crime and other things.

Q8 Chairman: I am surprised that you say that it is a low level crime on one sense. Anti-social behaviour clearly it not the same as murder but it has a very high level impact on communities, does it not?

Ms Casey: Absolutely, yes.

Q9 Chairman: In that sense, it is not really a low level crime at all.

Ms Casey: If you go to court with a criminal damage on one occasion, then that is not the same as going to court with GBH. That was the point I was attempting to make. If you go to court with one offence of intimidation or harassment, that is not the same as going to court with GBH. I am entirely in agreement with you 110 per cent that anti-social behaviour has an enormously corrosive effect, not only on individuals but on society overall. I think there is corrosion in some of the areas that I have seen and we are taking action and trying to tackle those areas. When you cover litter, graffiti, abandoned cars, that starts to restore confidence; when you start to restore confidence on those fronts, people start to come forward and give evidence about some of the more difficult things. Let us take the neighbour from hell, the neighbour with challenging problems, whichever label you wish to use for that family, and most people in the room, as you are MPs, know who I am talking about ---

Q10 Chairman: And we know where they live.

Ms Casey: And you know where they live. People sometimes find giving evidence against those people very difficult; they feel very intimidated by those people; they feel that they cannot come out and say anything. If people are living in an area such as some I can think of which we are working in at the moment where people celebrate an abandoned car being removed but the glass from it and the tyres are left behind, or they get up in the morning and have to take their kids through an area that has litter and graffiti and stuff written all over the walls, where people do not use the playground because it has syringes in it or they feel intimidated because the lighting is not good enough - you all know what I am talking about - then coming forward against that family feels like a much bigger gulf to them. I think we need to do both; we need to get members of the public empowered so that they are able to give evidence and come forward and complain. We need to make local authorities and other authorities more effective in how they tackle the neighbour from hell, but we need to do the cleaning and do that quickly land effectively because, in my opinion, there is a link between all those three things.

Q11 Mr Thomas: I wondered, on the broken window hypothesis, and I think we all see that ourselves as constituency MPs, how important you see design as having an effect on that. When I think of the worst parts of my constituency, those are the areas with the most cramped housing, the worst construction, and the most difficult streets to access, where public transport no longer goes because a bus cannot turn round at the top of the estate. How much does that impact on the way people deal with their communities?

Ms Casey: I think it does. I can think of areas such as the ones you are describing where there is no doubt that more effective design would be helpful. If you look at all the stuff that obviously the Deputy Prime Minister's Office is doing on the sustainable communities programme, they put design and environment very high up their agenda in terms of then creating clean, safe areas, places that are easy to keep clean and easy to make safe. It has been going on for generations but all the programmes - SRB and City Challenge - did put those higher up the agenda. I think the community programme will do the same. Do I think that that is an excuse for litter, graffiti, abandoned cars, intimidation, harassment, spitting at old ladies? No, I do not. Yes, of course we can make design better. I think there are ways we can do that and programmes that are happening. People prioritise these much more than they used to. Do I think that is an excuse for fly-posting, litter, noise, graffiti, harassment and intimidation? No, I do not. You cannot excuse one by the other. It is an element and it is like saying - and this is a bit more controversial - that it is all right for young people between the ages of 15 and 25 when they are at a shopping parade not allowing anybody to feel able to go to and from their shops at night because there is not a youth club. That makes no sense to me at all. It does not make any sense at all to any members of the general public because they think bad behaviour is bad behaviour, and you call it bad behaviour and you sort it. Coming to the fly-posting agenda of this Audit Committee today, that that is bad behaviour too. We need a much higher discussion and debate. I was really pleased that you asked me to come and I will be pleased to see the results of this because I think we need to raise the fact that this is a social justice issue, too. This is a welfare issue, too. This is not just about crime but about people feeling that they have some control over their own environment. Bad behaviour, whether it is spitting in the sidewalk, to use an American expression, or throwing litter or putting your fish and chips stuff down at the end, is environmental crime, and that is about environmental justice.

Q12 Mr Thomas: There is another end to that as well. I accept that but it does not help to solve the issue. Just saying that people are badly behaved is not going to help us to address that. On the design point, how does that impact on authorities themselves which are tasked with cleaning that graffiti and litter? There is a two-way process. In order to build confidence in their communities, to get people into interact with authorities once again, so that they feel it is worth giving rein to litter lying about or the abandoned car, or whatever it may be, then you have to see authorities themselves, wherever they are, and we have already identified there is a myriad of them, responding in a way that is adequate. I certainly come across design being used as an excuse for example not to clean up the streets because you have a narrow council estate and therefore all the cars are parked on the kerb and all over the pavement and they say, "We cannot possibly clean up there because it is just too difficult". That in itself has a corrosive effect, does it not?

Ms Casey: It has a very corrosive effect. I have worked in the public sector for 20 years of my life. I am a signed-up member of it and I believe in it, but I also know its faults. One of its faults sometimes is that if you can find a million reasons not to do something, then you will. That is something that we are challenging over and over with the Together campaign. I am tired of hearing people say they have got an excuse not to do it. We are in agreement. You are saying: do not use design as a reason not to get a smaller vehicle up to clean the area; do not use design as a reason not to get a minibus rather than a big bus; do not use design as an excuse. I am absolutely a signed-up member of wanting to remove the excuses for inaction on these sorts of issues right across the country. That is very much what the Together campaign, the help line, all of those things, are saying: we need to remove the excuses for inaction. If I am charitable about it, I would say that we need to empower people to know what they can do to make sure that they are challenging those sorts of issues. I want to come back to addressing that and confrontation. There is a culture in this country, which I think is a very laudable and lovely culture, about being British, which is that people - clearly you lot do not - on the whole find confrontation very difficult. It is one of our nicer traits that we do not find it easy to say, "Listen, your son the other week....." unless we know that person really well. I heard a true story very recently of a brand new London bus and somebody "graffitied" in front of everybody, the entire bus. That person wrote on the inside top deck of the bus, and nobody challenged them. That is appalling, in my view, in that what we have to do is get a bit more of the "I am not getting off the tube until it runs on time" attitude. All it needed was for somebody to go down and say to the driver very quietly, "Seal the doors, call the police, drive back to base and get this person". That is what I am trying to say here. I do think when you name something as not being OK, that is a good start, and not a lot of that happens here. It is not all right to throw chewing gum on the floor. We do not hear the politicians say that. We are hearing it now. It is not OK. We need to hear community leaders and local authorities say it. We need people to be saying that it is not acceptable ---

Q13 Chairman: Ms Casey, this is a fascinating answer but it is breaking a record for length! I want to ask you one final thing. You are bringing a huge passion to this, and that is clear and very welcome. I wondered to what extent you are concerned that the Government's new high profile involvement in all this area is going to let local authorities off the hook.

Ms Casey: The message that certainly we are pushing through in the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit, for which I am responsible, is: at the end of the day, we can put an Act through Parliament. We have new powers coming in this area on 31 March. We have a fantastic Together campaign, which gives people all the tools they need to remove all the excuses, no matter what they are, but it will stand and fall on whether local people feel their local authorities and the local police authorities are listening to them. At the end of the day, it does come down to all sorts of things we have in place; we are empowering people to do all sorts of things. I think, though, and this is quite heartening, that if every local authority looks at the polling that they do - and we all do it - and at their focus groups or their consultation meetings, they will see that the issues you are looking at here today will dominate. They must start to listen to those issues. It is not just about getting elected but about keeping their good services running all year round. That is the other part of what we are pushing. We are saying: listen to local people and take action. What I do not want is action to be waiting on "we need a five-year regeneration programme" or "we need a 20-year social justice programme". I want that action to be about getting the litter picked up tomorrow and prosecuting the hell out of anybody they find breaking the law on that front.

Q14 Mr Challen: I do not want to incriminate myself but I seem to recall that when I was a teenager there was a lot of bad behaviour. I am wondering if it is any worse now or are we in the middle of the latest moral hysteria or moral panic and we have given it a new name and we are expecting the Government to sort it all out because we ourselves, as you have said, the man on the Clapham omnibus, are not prepared to tackle it?

Ms Casey: Part of tackling it is getting, as you say, the man on the Clapham omnibus to play a role. All the time I meet with local communities and individuals and I am saying that we need them to stand up and take a stand and say, "The authorities can come behind you but we need you to take a stand". That is the starting point of the Government's strategy on anti-social behaviour. It needs the public to take a stand and come out and come forward. The more that people are able to do for themselves, the better. On the first part of your question about kids hanging around, youth nuisance is a dominating issue for the public. The British crime survey shows that. We will respond to that. What communities are saying is that they have had enough of some of this. It is not all about just providing youth clubs and future positives and positive future funding and youth service funding. A lot of money has gone into that area and that has been great but there is a flip side, which is around the enforcement agenda. That enforcement agenda needs to be heard here. We need our local authorities and police authorities to be enforcing - and I do not necessarily mean by court action at all. There was a place where they were about to use the new dispersal powers, and by a process of going and talking to the people at the area saying, "We are going to use these dispersal powers", they dispersed the problem without having to use the power. That was a great result. I was delighted by that. The less court action we have on this stuff, the better.

Q15 Mr Challen: Is it any worse now than it was 20 years ago. Twenty years is a key period. When people talk about things in the past, they always say, "Twenty years ago, it was not as bad as this". If we go right back, tracing the history of vandalism, in the nineteenth century they were saying, at the turn of the century, "Twenty years ago it was not as biased as this". Is it any worse?

Ms Casey: I do not know if it is any worse. I know the public believe it to be significantly worse.

Q16 Mr Challen: Are we keeping figures on anti-social behaviour now?

Ms Casey: Yes, we use the British crime statistics as a way of dictating what we do. The British crime statistics survey shows very clearly that people are very concerned about youth nuisance. I would, however, say that if you look at what we are doing on anti-social behaviour, we are not particularly zeroing in on youth who are intimidating and hanging around. It is about any group of any kind. If you are asking for my personal opinion, I think that the behaviour of some people is slightly more out of control now. People do think it is all right to throw rubbish on the floor and they do think it is all right to harangue people as they go in and out of convenience stores in some of the estates. It is all right for us to say, "Actually, we are not happy". Whether it was a problem 50 years ago is not really relevant to me. What is relevant to me is that everywhere we have gone in the last year people have said that they want this issue tackled. The taxpayer is paying me to tackle it and I report to Ministers on tackling it.

Q17 Mr Challen: Do you think that the commoner availability of certain technologies has made the matter worse? Joy riding now does seem to be a lot worse. We do have a lot more cars around and a lot more older vehicles, which seem to be the target. People have louder hi-fi's. Noise nuisance is now considerably worse that it was 20 years ago. I think you can demonstrate that by the sheer power of these things. Spray paints are perhaps more available and cheaper comparatively. Do these things contribute?

Ms Casey: We are bringing in quite significant restrictions on spray paints because we are concerned at how they are used in relation to graffiti. You have to start from where you are. This is not a nanny state. You start from where the people are. If people have hi-fi's, they should use them responsibly. I have a hi-fi and I am sure I could make my neighbour's life a complete misery if I decided to play a CD at top volume day in and day out.

Q18 Mr Challen: If you look at what is on offer and how these things are marketed, with hi-fi's you will see that they are designed to be powerful, to be loud.

Ms Casey: It is OK if on a Friday night or a Saturday night once every few months you have a party and you tell your neighbours about it. What we are missing here is that you can do design and limit noise but you are abdicating personal responsibility. The reason I am delighted to be part of this is that I have spent my life trying to work on things to do with social justice and I see this thing about personal responsibility; people have to take personal responsibility. We need to push the boundaries back about them taking personal responsibility. There is a line. You can support and help people and all of those sorts of things, but if they then cross over that line, there have to be consequences. I do not think it is realistic for the Director of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit to say to Ministers, "We need to get videos of evidence of a particular area". It is much more appropriate, in my view, for a government to say: "There is personal responsibility and there is government responsibility and there is a meeting of minds." That is what this is about. You can find a million excuses to put your noise up; you have to find a million reasons to keep it down. That applies to the people next door with kids.

Q19 Mr Challen: It is often said that in schools children can learn about the environment, they can learn about respect for others, they can learn about citizenship and so on, but when they leave school, they are then subject to all these pressures that society puts on them. If they go and see a film or watch TV, they learn a lot from that. What they will learn to a certain extent is that it is all right to be aggressive and it is all right to be loud, or whatever, because a lot of that happens certainly in recent films with violence. That can be part of their conditioning, if you like?

Ms Casey: I do not agree with that. I think the vast majority of young people behave in a perfectly decent and law-abiding way. We keep perpetuating this "it is all about youth, it is all about kids, it is all about them being conditioned". I just fundamentally disagree with that. It is fascinating to me that the vast majority of teenagers and young people completely understand what morals are, completely get this stuff. In some of the meetings I have been at the youngsters are significantly upset and they are often upset because they feel people are getting at them. They do not feel that they are the perpetrators of a lot of this stuff. They feel that they are put upon. The Anti-Social Behaviour Strategy, the Together campaign, is very much not targeted at any particular age group. A pensioner recently received an anti-social behaviour order. He behaved in the most appalling fashion day in and day out. Let us not forget that this is not a youth issue, genuinely it is not. For every film that is released with violence, there is a romantic comedy coming out which the youngsters also go and see. Maybe I am being anecdotal here, but that is my view. I do not think we should see this as a youth issue. A lot of them are very proud of their country. They deserve to live in an environment that is clean and safe. They have an equal role and responsibility in that. The more we model that behaviour as adults, the more effective that is. I do not think going to see The Matrix Revolutions means that tomorrow they are going to go out and knock down an old lady. I just do not see that connection.

Q20 Mr Challen: Does the Anti-Social Unit really only tackle the effects of anti-social behaviour or is it also involved in looking at the causes as well?

Ms Casey: I am really clear that there are an awful lot of things that have happened in the last five to ten years, such as SureStart, Positive Futures, Supporting People and homelessness programmes, that have been put in place and they are all part of an overall strategy to tackle anti-social behaviour. In the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit right now with the Together campaign we need to get people to work together to take action. Action will speak louder than words. One of my proudest moments at the end of last week was when a local authority called the Together action line, got the rules and regulations on how to close a crack house and that night went out and closed a crack house. That is what this unit is in the business of making happen.

Q21 Paul Flynn: As one of your admirers when you held the role of the homelessness czarina, I thought you brought a very refreshing and practical approach to homelessness. You said earlier on that that is not what you are employed for. What are you employed for? Why are you doing this job now?

Ms Casey: It goes back to the last answer. Basically I am trying to fulfil David Blunkett's and Hazel Blear's agenda to make sure that local communities and areas tackle rather than tolerate anti-social behaviour. That is my essential job.

Q22 Paul Flynn: One of the things that has come through to us is the multiplicity of government departments and agencies which are really trying to do something about this problem. Is there a danger that some of the problems will fall through the cracks, that they will be no-one's responsibility, and others are being dealt with by two or three departments wastefully? Is that a problem?

Ms Casey: One similarity between my current role and my previous role is that part of my brief is to make sure that we are joining up different government departments. Let us take abandoned cars as an example. Abandoned cars historically was not really nailed in terms of policy responsibility to any government department, and rightly so. It is a difficult one. It is one of the ones that could fall through the cracks. One of my jobs was to work with different government departments to make sure that we did nail a government department, which is now the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, to make sure that we are all linked together with them to do it.

Q23 Paul Flynn: Do you think you are sufficiently resourced for that? It is a silly question to ask because no-one ever says, "Yes, we are".

Ms Casey: I think we are.

Q24 Paul Flynn: That is a refreshing answer.

Ms Casey: You do not need any resources for joined-up government on my issues.

Q25 Paul Flynn: You did mention that we MPs are odd people in that we are into confrontation. We are into believing myths as well - babies cry, dogs bark, politicians legislate - and we are eager to legislate on everything. Now we have the Anti-Social Behaviour Act, is there else within the legislation we can do to improve the situation?

Ms Casey: I think there are some things on the environmental side that might be helpful. The one that continues to strike me is when you get gating schemes around the country; there is an issue about that which annoys me slightly. I am hoping, if there is some environmental legislation down the track, that we may be able to do that. There are a number of bits and pieces that did not get into our Bill that certainly Defra would feel would be helpful to it.

Q26 Paul Flynn: I think you have correctly said that we should not look for alibis and the negative endless blame for this and that. What are the practical solutions that you think are going to be most productive? Is it disingenuous to believe that we can implement those solutions without extra resources?

Ms Casey: The main thing that strikes me about this whole agenda is whether people have the right attitude. Let us take Southwark as a good example of a local authority as I have someone on our team seconded from Southwark and I am familiar with it. Southwark decided that politically this was a priority and politically they had worked out and started doing some things on the enforcement side in a high profile way. That typifies what is going on around the country: when people decide they are going to do it, they do it. If they listened more, entered the debate and listened to what their local taxpayers are saying, they would be prioritising this issue. Everyone comes into this room saying there are not enough resources. I am not sure on this particular agenda that it is not a case of: where there is a will there is a way. There are very good examples where people clear abandoned cars; they do not just take the racist abuse off the walls, as they need to do within 24 hours, but they are able to take graffiti off within a week or two weeks; they manage to get the noise abatement team sorting out problems; and, interestingly, they link in with the wider anti-social behaviour team to look at who the individuals are in the community perpetuating all of this. Your problem families are likely or possibly going to be doing some of the stuff which this Committee is worrying about. I genuinely believe it is about where there is a will there is a way. If people care about social justice, they care about environmental justice. That is what has to be prioritised.

Q27 Paul Flynn: Just say a word about this. Colin Challen was a strong teenager when I was a grumpy old man. I am sure that your valiant defence of young people is absolutely right, that we are predisposed to blame the young. Having seen this book with the title I'm Just a Teenage Dirt Bag, Baby! presumably that is an attractive chat-up line. There is a degree of anarchy that does appear to be more prevalent in the young generation than previously. It was always there, I am sure; young people always wanted to kick against the older generation, but it does seem to me more prevalent and to a greater degree now than it was previously. Surely that is the case?

Ms Casey: I cannot sit here and say whether it is more prevalent or not more prevalent. I know we have got to get better - and we are getting better but we need to get a lot better - about enforcing basic rules and showing that there the consequences for people, whether they are 15 or 50, if they break those rules. Those rules can be small rules and they do not have to be for GBH; they can be for litter dropping. Another local authority goes around on a Saturday and if they see somebody dropping litter on the ground they say, "Were you that person that just dropped the litter on the floor?" and they embarrass that person a bit and it gets into the local newspapers. I am a paid-up member of a bit of embarrassment from time to time as a good technique. We just need to have lots of different ways to get people to enforce the rules. That does not just mean court actions; it can be done in many different ways. The starting point is when people locally decide they have had enough and they want to take a stand.

Q28 Mrs Clark: Just following on from the last points and before I get to my main questions, I disagree with what you are saying about embarrassing people and saying, "Hey, are you the person who dropped that piece of litter?" I think the reason people do not say that, even though they might consider doing it, is because that person, whom they do not know, might turn round and sock them in the face, quite frankly.

Ms Casey: It is all right for a street warden to do it. It is all right for a neighbourhood warden to do it. It is all right for the environmental health officer to do. That is what I am encouraging. That is the example I am citing.

Q29 Mrs Clark: We cannot all wear uniforms. We cannot all wear those orange coats that the street wardens wear.

Ms Casey: No, but there are a lot of people who do wear the coats. There are a lot of people who do wear the sweatshirts. Interestingly, where you have neighbourhood wardens in renewal areas, they have been challenging bad behaviour. Where you see street wardens and neighbourhood wardens on estates, one of the things they get to grips with very much is just raising the level of rule-making, so that if people see somebody they know as John who is the neighbourhood warden, I think they have a greater sense of responsibility about not messing up the environment. That is a good thing.

Q30 Mrs Clark: They might tell the neighbourhood warden. In Peterborough these wardens are excellent. I totally agree with you that people would report something to the warden, but I still do not think there is going to be a culture of an individual person, say me, walking down the street and, when I see somebody doing something offensive, going up and taking that action upon myself to challenge them and police them. I think it is very unrealistic to suggest that people would do that because obviously people are concerned about their own personal safety.

Ms Casey: I am not suggesting people do it individually.

Q31 Mrs Clark: That seemed to be what you were implying.

Ms Casey: Let me make it clear. I am not suggesting that people do that individually, unless they feel comfortable to do so. I am not into vigilantes and "have a go heroes" as people could be injured, but if 30 people are on a bus and one perpetrator "graffities" the back of that bus, I am saying that it is 30 against one. More often than not, perpetrators of anti-social behaviour are small in number and people do not challenge them. I have a friend who was tired of a particular individual allowing her dog to foul a particular area directly opposite her house. I said to her, "Talk to your neighbours and see if they are upset about that as well". When she did that, they were upset and as a group they went and talked to the individual and said, "Listen, we just do not like this". That is what I am encouraging. I am not encouraging anything other than that.

Q32 Mrs Clark: You are talking about collective action and collective responsibility?

Ms Casey: Yes, this is all about collective responsibility.

Q33 Mrs Clark: Moving on to alternative strategies, some of the memoranda we have had from government seem to be very much approving of the idea of alternative strategies and getting away from what you said yourself, always relying on the court to sentence. Is this an excuse really because the police do not police properly and magistrates do not sentence properly? I have to say, and again I am talking quite locally in the sense of my own constituency, that I go out door-knocking every Sunday, not canvassing but knocking on doors - "Hello, it's me, I am your MP. Is there anything I can help you with?" Ten to one they tell me exactly this type of thing you have been talking about. People are very upset by it. They will point, as happened a couple of weeks ago, to a nasty old dilapidated scout hut down at the bottom of their garden, totally ignored, a haven for rats that were coming into their garden and thus into their kitchen. When I said, "Have you contacted the police?" the answer was, "The police were not really very interested. When a councillor contacted the police on some of these matters, not that one in particular but other ones, the police said. 'We are sorry but modern policing is not like this any more. We have particular targets. Our government Home Office target is car theft and burglaries. It is not our priority to go knocking on doors and dealing with this small scale stuff. We are reliant on government funding'."

Ms Casey: The first thing to say is that often solutions are not necessarily in the hands of the police. In the case you have described, I would say if there are rats and a dilapidated scout hut, that is probably more in the domain of the local authority than the police. It is not that I wish the police not to be involved in this; I do not wish the police or the courts not to be involved but quite the opposite. I am saying that in order to pull off the Together campaign, you have to get people working at all sorts of different levels in terms of challenging and tackling anti-social behaviour. If everything just ends up in court, that is not a good thing. You do not just want to increase the number of people with criminal records but you do want to get the behaviour challenged. I can only go by some of the experience of people out there. For example, if challenging behaviour occurs, sometimes just a visit from a housing officer, a police officer and Social Services to a family can sort out a problem magically overnight. That does not involve an anti-social behaviour order, it does not involve taking the matter to court. It involves making clear what the score is and offering some support if necessary. You cannot say, "The police are telling me this, Social Services are telling me that, housing is telling the other". They get joined-up dialogue in one visit to deal with it. That is the point I am trying to make here. I am working with the Magistrates' Association to try and help magistrates with some of the sentencing. For example, since January of this year, the Magistrates' Association has had its own sentencing guidelines for breach of ASBOs. I think agreement is needed in public services, in the courts and in the police. I become disappointed when I hear you say that about the police because I know that there are loads of areas of the country where the police are really linked in. There are more police officers now and we can feel in some areas that there are more community support officers; there are 3,500 of them right now. We have street wardens and neighbourhood wardens. The police reform agenda of David Blunkett and Hazel Blears is getting the police to be more tied in and linked in with their communities. That is great. That type of approach would help in many of the anti-social behaviour issues.

Q34 Chairman: Very briefly on the work you are doing with the magistrates' courts, is it your view, because a lot of people have expressed it, that current sentences are just far too lenient?

Ms Casey: Sentences have to fit the crime and the criminal. I am a lay magistrate - I have stood down - and so I can see this from both sides of the spectrum. There is no point in imposing a £5,000 fine on an individual who is on benefit. It is more appropriate to make the sentence affordable. If he or she cannot pay that back within two years, go for a community service order. Magistrates need to be more reflective of what the community concerns would be. Imposing a £50 fine for serial criminal damage just does not work for me. If somebody seriously breaches an ASBOs, letting them off with something very low level does not work for me. Having said that, some of the big companies, for example, are doing fly-posting. I get really frustrated that £500 fines are being handed out for that; that is a meal ticket. One of the reasons magistrates are drawn from the local community is so that they can try to reflect a bit more what the community would want in these scenarios.

Chairman: Thank you very much. It has been a fascinating session. We are extremely grateful to you. Ultimately, I think it has been quite an encouraging session as well. We are grateful to you and to Mr Niblet who, for some reason or other, did not manage to get a word in edgeways!

Memorandum submitted by ENCAMS

Examination of Witness

Witness: Mr Alan Woods, Chief Executive, ENCAMS, examined.

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 per cent 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 standard 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 a generation, 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 per cent. 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 somehow 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 sectors. 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 anything, 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".

Q40 Paul Flynn: You made a very strong point about the use of chewing gum, which is something that existed during the war, then did not exist for 20 or 30 years afterwards, and then came in again. The reason it is so popular is because of the commercial interest of the companies involved. The companies seem impervious to any criticism or pleas to them to alter their product in a way so that it can be disposed of in some clean or easy way or be made dissolvable. Where do you think the pressure should be? Should we have the Head of Cadbury's in here and give him a rollicking?

Mr Woods: The Select Committee on Living Places did actually have Wrigley's in front of them and asked them some questions on the whole issue of gum deposition. The Minister, Alun Michael, and Defra have set up an action group made up of representatives from the industry, which includes Wrigley's and ourselves and other interested parties. It is tasked to make an action plan to come forward to him by the spring. Part of that is going through a range of solutions. One thing that I think will have to be part of that solution is to campaign locally. It is costing a local authority roughly £30,000 to clean up the city centre each time they do it.

Q41 Paul Flynn: Many of the memoranda we have had here say that education is the key to delivering in this area. They were less convincing perhaps than what you have said. There is a belief, a canard possibly, that environmental education is paying dividends and it is showing the way. Some suggest, in fact, that educating children is helpful in improving the behaviour of councils and parents. Is this true?

Mr Woods: I think there is a bit of pester power, as it is called. I get pestered by my son on a whole range of issues and sometimes I listen to him. I think we have to be careful that we do not see education as the universal panacea for all of this. I totally agree with Ms Casey that there is something about personal social responsibility and then there is corporate responsibility. She has already mentioned the issue of fly-posting. When you get these big companies, like Warner, Sony, EMI and BMG, engaging in illegal activity through a third party, I think the Government needs to take note of this and say that enough is enough. It is no good, even though there are new powers coming in with the Anti-Social Behaviour Act about issuing fixed penalty notices to people who fly-post, because most of those doing it are students and, all right, there are physical guys doing it but they are not actually the main perpetrators. We have done some work on fly-posting and we have written to every chief executive of every major record company. We have had some positive replies saying that they will stop this happening, but it is still going on. I really do think that both local government and central government have got to give a strong lead that this is an unacceptable form of environmental crime.

Q42 Mrs Clark: That really my first question actually which you have very helpfully answered. In terms of what action can they take, you are saying that local government and central government need to actually take a strong line. What does that mean? What would you have them do? It is not just naming and shaming, is it, because words are cheap?

Mr Woods: We have named and shaped them already as much as we can in the publicity that we did, having gone out in a huge double-decker bus and played music outside their front door saying it is the "Great Rock and Roll Swindle". These people seem impervious because the financial rewards for doing it are so great in the promotion of their product that they are willing to accept the odd chance they may be nicked for their offence. What we have got to do is make directors personally liable.

Q43 Mrs Clark: Financially?

Mr Woods: Yes and not to hide behind some corporate plc status. If they are engaging in crime they should be held liable as anybody else.

Q44 Mrs Clark: We have been talking about music companies, record companies, great rock and roll, et cetera, but it is not just that, is it, it is also condoms, it is also Mates Condoms who are a perpetrator of this? Playing devil's advocate what they would say is, "We are being beneficial and we are actually protecting the health of the nation, preventing people get sexual diseases, et cetera, and also what about all these underage pregnancies?" What would you say to counteract that?

Mr Woods: My view is that they are still engaging in a form of illegal activity that needs to be stopped. It is very difficult for members of the public to get these mixed messages that it is okay in some circumstances and not okay in others. Taking it in a littering context, it is okay to litter within a railway station because it is going to be picked up and there are no bins but as soon as you get outside that railway station you are not supposed to litter. There are some very difficult messages to members of the public. There are some organisations, especially on the fly-posting that have not responded to our recent request to cease this activity. 1188 (?) and Sony have not responded to these allegations and they are people who are engaging in fly-posting.

Q45 Mrs Clark: So therefore the whole stance of advise and warn, name and shame is not going to work, is it, so it is going to have to be government legislation surely?

Mr Woods: There are new opportunities certainly within the Anti-Social Behaviour Act about individuals who do the fly-posting themselves. I also think we need to co-ordinate, and something we are considering is co-ordinating a mass prosecution of these companies because these posters blight most of urban Britain.

Q46 Mrs Clark: In conjunction presumably with something like the Environment Agency?

Mr Woods: The responsibility for fly-posting will mainly be with local authorities because the Town and Country Planning Act is where all that lies. It is not an Environment Agency responsibility area.

Q47 Chairman: Can we just be clear on this. Do the powers exist to hold the corporate directors to account for fly-posting at the moment because we kind of understood they did not. The guy with his bucket of glue can be done but the man sitting at Sony HQ cannot. I thought that is what you said earlier.

Mr Woods: That is my understanding. The Anti-Social Behaviour Act brings in on 31 March the powers to issue fixed penalty notices to people who fly-post and also to remove fly-posting graffiti. What I am saying is I think there is an issue in corporate and social responsibility for the major record companies to be held accountable for them engaging third parties to fly-post.

Q48 Chairman: As the law stands at the moment any collective case you brought would be unlikely to succeed?

Mr Woods: What we are hoping is if I can co-ordinate with local authority colleagues across the country on all these sites that they have to be removed and there is a cost for the removal of the individual posters, instead of having a one-off action by one local authority, we could summons each of those record companies for a collective action across the country.

Q49 Mrs Clark: I think you are going to find it very difficult to get that kind of collective agreement. Earlier on in your evidence you were talking about dog fouling and you were mentioning about local authorities using bylaws. I would be really grateful if you would write to my local authority because I have been trying to push them to do this about dog fouling for seven years and the answer is, "Oh no, we can't." On a final note why do you think the topic of local environmental crime, anti-social behaviour, et cetera, is suddenly the buzz topic? Why is everybody suddenly talking about it? I do not think that this is a new phenomenon. It has been going on for years and years. I do not think it is any more now than it was, say, in the 1970s, but why are local people just now starting to talk about it and perhaps the way they have accepted it 30 years ago?

Mr Woods: I think people come into contact with better quality environments. They are much more mobile than they were.

Q50 Mrs Clark: Perhaps abroad, better quality abroad?

Mr Woods: I think there is and also some of the city centre regeneration schemes have shown what can be done with city centres and yet when we go out into high-density housing areas, whether social or private housing, from the survey we have just done we can see that the situation is worse and I think that people are not prepared to put up with this level of environmental neglect and degradation. I think there is something in the fact that people are now more aware of the environment they live in. Whether that is due to people being more mobile or they have got higher and more affluent status, there has been no long-term research. Like a lot of these environmental issues this whole lack of research is something that comes up again and again. At least now having a definitive survey (at least in England) you can measure whether things are getting better or worse.

Mrs Clark: Hopefully as a Committee we are by holding this inquiry contributing to that research. I hope that when it comes out that yourself and Louise Casey and others will be looking at it and pressing those recommendations on governments, whatever they are. Thank you.

Q51 Mr Challen: You have pointed out in your memorandum that many local authorities have not met their statutory responsibilities. Do you think that is a result of a lack of political will or a lack of resources?

Mr Woods: I know what local authorities would say and I do have some sympathy with that, but there need to be more champions about this issue. Mrs Clark was just saying about this Committee raising these issues. This needs to happen within local government as well. The whole government reform agenda in terms of modernising local government, we have Cabinet responsibility but I do not suppose there are many local authorities who have public space champions or public space executive members with that sort of responsibility. I think that would be something that would be a very strong signal to say to local authorities that you have got to (1) have champions about and (2) you have got to have some integrated strategies. You cannot deal with parks, for example on a case-by-case basis. Where is your green parks strategy? If you are going to provide facilities for youths in one area and not provide them in another, that is fine as long as it is part of a co-ordinated strategy. Why are you trying to put little drips of money across a whole range of public space issues? The Government released a report recently called Caring For Quality, which Yvette Cooper signed up to, and there are four key paragraphs within that which they say about local authorities. One is about co-ordination, one is about investment, one about is better regulation, and one is about better maintenance. All of those things need to get better. Some of those are about resources. Some of that is going to be about somebody taking this as a lead and doing something about it.

Q52 Mr Challen: Do you think central government is providing a sufficient lead to local authorities?

Mr Woods: I think the lead that was given by the Prime Minister in 2001 has kick-started a whole range of different responses because before that it was local authorities that wanted to take this as an issue were doing something about it but the political agenda in terms of central government I think was relatively lacking. There at least is a recognition, and that has all come back from surveys that have been done by MORI and others that people want something done about this issue. By highlighting it, a whole range of initiatives are flowing out, not least of which was anti-social behaviour and its Act and the resources that Defra are now putting into this issue. That has been a strong lead and then there is this Committee debating it.

Q53 Mr Challen: In the immediate, short-term future, say, in the next handful of years do you think the local authorities have the capacity within existing resources to get their act together? At what point do you have to go to the council taxpayer and say, "Look, we need more money off you to deal with this problem?"

Mr Woods: I think that has happened already and in the whole issue of business improvement we are going to ask for an increased business rate levy from businesses for environmental improvement. That would be part of the same and the evidence would suggest from the States that that has not only increased productivity and turnover for those businesses but has contributed to increasing local environmental policy. Also in the United States there is a separate residential tax called a RID, a Residential Improvement District. Whether people would be prepared to pay for that will be down to a democratic vote, as it will be within the business community. There is an element whereby we will need some extra resources to do some long-term strategies but what worries me is the local environmental infrastructure that we have at the moment is with us for the next 30 years and that is the point when we have good examples of new build and that is fantastic but what we have got we have got for another 30 years and we have got to do something better than what we are doing at the moment.

Q54 Mr Challen: Some problems have been created by local authorities themselves. I had a case of this in my own constituency where it borders on another local authority, and that local authority (Kirklees as it happens) made it impossible for people from Leeds to use their household waste site even though that was the closest one to them because they would only serve their own council taxpayers. They are very defensive about this. Can we do anything to tackle that very defensive attitude that "we only serve the people who live within this boundary"? Quite clearly it can create problems within that boundary when those people are prevented from dumping their stuff in a proper place.

Mr Woods: Local councils have a role to play in making sure that there is best practice transmitted. There are initiatives that have happened such as the (?) council scheme where best practice within local government is being shared, but where you have demarcation issues it is difficult. Mr Challen, you talk about the local issue you have. You have only got to look at where the Houses of Parliament are situated and Westminster, Camden and Brent all use the same private cleansing contractor, all on a different contract, probably all with different standards and all with different funding regimes, and it would seem to me as a lay person to make sense that somehow that was co-ordinated across those three areas. Where you have got a drugs problem (and drugs-related litter is another increasing area) in King's Cross, as soon as you cross the boundary literally within a few roads you are in a different local authority patch and there is a different regime for clearing up some of this mess. So I think there is an issue where there does need to be greater co-ordination by local authorities on some of these more strategic issues because litter does not stay in one place.

Q55 Chairman: Can we go back quickly to fast food. You are drawing up a voluntary code, are you not?

Mr Woods: We are.

Q56 Chairman: I am quite sure that, despite Mr Thomas's problem with McDonald's, big companies will be happy publicly to sign up to that. Will there not be a real problem though with some of the smaller franchises? Can you really expect them to get involved?

Mr Woods: It is voluntary, that is the first thing to say, Chairman. I would hope that it would make sense to those smaller outlets to do so and a lot of it is whether they have got a trade waste licence. A lot of businesses do not have proper facilities for the disposal of their own waste from their own premises. What we are also saying is that as well as having a basic legal requirement which is the minimum they should be trying to educate consumers of those products to do things differently. Placing a bin outside or having some form of poster in their shop or asking people do they need to have a plastic bag wrapped round their sandwich which is probably in a polystyrene wrapper anyway. Those things are not difficult to do. However, as you say, it is those micro businesses and SMEs where the real challenge is to happen. Local authorities at the moment have powers to force people to clean up outside their shops. What we have found is that local authorities have been reluctant to use the legislation. Why that is so I am not sure. There is a responsibility on them to do so but at the moment local authorities can serve upon certain businesses this restriction about making them clean up outside their premises and they should be encouraged to do so.

Q57 Chairman: Are you talking to the fast food people about the packaging itself?

Mr Woods: It is part of the wider debate. The industry in terms of packaging would say packaging is what the consumer is asking for. My own belief is that the packaging has increased over the years which has led to a greater preponderance of people who drop litter. People do not want to be bothered with packaging. One of the issues we have in the chewing gum issue is whether we should design better packaging for gum. From the research which is being presented to Alun Michael it would seem that people will not even use a different form of packaging if you provide a box for the used gum to go in. This is not going to change people's behaviour at all, which is worrying.

Q58 Chairman: Have voluntary schemes of this kind worked in the past?

Mr Woods: We have run voluntary schemes of a similar nature. Stoke-on-Trent City Council have run a voluntary scheme for the past two years. A district council in the South West has been running a voluntary scheme and there are individual boroughs which have been doing similar voluntary codes of practice with businesses. This is the first one apart from the Stoke one targeted at the fast food industry.

Q59 Chairman: Have the previous schemes been successful?

Mr Woods: Yes they have. The Stoke one has had an impact, yes.

Q60 Chairman: Is not one of the problems here we are really coping with unsustainable consumption patterns? I wondered whether you or anybody else has done any analysis on what proportion of cost of our weekly spending ends up on the street?

Mr Woods: I think it is about unsustainable consumption. I do not think anybody has looked at it in terms of cost. I can tell you that local authorities are planning to spend nearly £500 million this year on street cleansing. I suppose you could work out that as a proportion of people's council tax spent on cleaning it up. That plus the cost of the product would produce a staggering sum.

Q61 Chairman: You said a problem is teenagers and there seems to be a slight difference of opinion between your analysis of that and the previous witness's, who suggested that teenagers were collectively a form of a sweetness and light, which did not strike a familiar chord with many of us. Teenagers do not pay council tax anyway so tough!

Mr Woods: I think the only difference between Louise's interpretation and mine is that we know that there are certain groups of teenagers who need to have behavioural change. On a more general point, are teenagers part of the solution? Yes, of course they are. However, we do have to recognise the real world in which teenagers live and you or me telling them not to litter is not going to be very high on their radar. We have start to use some of the tactics of the advertising industry to get our message across in a much more effective way rather than just: "Do not do it because somebody might stop you."

Q62 Chairman: Final question on the magistrates, who came in for a bit of flack not only today but in previous sessions. We had some evidence from Mr Max Rathmell, the Chair of the Spen Valley Civic Society who told us in his memorandum: "As for magistrates, special mention should be made. They are hopeless. They consistently fail to take environmental crime seriously." Would you agree with that? Mr Rathmell is not alone, by the way.

Mr Woods: No, I think there is a level of inconsistency that has been applied by the courts in these areas and when local authorities take the trouble to take prosecutions forward to the court, what they are seeing is that the costs of doing so are prohibitive so that those costs are never recovered. There has been discussion before, I do not know whether this will come up again about having some form of green courts within the court system. I do not know whether that is possible. I am not a legal expert so I could not comment. It would seem sensible to me that if you are having to deal with an issue at one level which might involve GBH or some form of physical violence and then at the next moment you are having to deal with a littering offence, as a human being you would relatively weigh those up. I think we need to look at the way in which we have reparation orders. I think one of the things we should be using them much more as the way we make people repay their debt to society by getting them to engage in the cleaning up of some of the problems they are causing. I wholeheartedly support the Community Service Orders and also there is the non-payment of fines imposed by the court, which should have some form of environmental reparation as well. I am delighted to see that the Home Office is starting to look at this and see whether that can be introduced into this country.

Q63 Chairman: Do you feel just lastly that the failure of the Magistrates' Courts, which I think you suggested and many other people acknowledge, is really the reason why we have this accumulation of alternative remedies, all sorts of strategies and initiatives and codes and advertising and ideas and documents about Teenage Dirt Bags? If the courts were doing their job do you not think life would be a lot simpler?

Mr Woods: If one believes that the prison population is now at its maximum, one would presume that they are doing their job insofar as they can send people to prison. What has to happen is there has to be a variety of approaches because this problem is getting worse and the ultimate deterrent of either fining or imprisonment does not seem to be working. I think we need to have much more front of pipe solutions, we have to try and convince people that their behaviours are incorrect, we have got to have some elements where they are involved in cleaning up, we have got to give the community the opportunity to work with local authorities, and the local authorities have got to accept some responsibility to provide leadership in these areas. That is all part of the package and I think the courts are the end result. The other thing which is a failure in the court system is trying to rely on enforcement only. If we rely on enforcement that is not a long-term strategy and the costs will just multiply.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, you have been very helpful.