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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 445-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE Environmental Audit Committee (Environmental Crime SUB committee) Fly-tipping, Fly-posting, Litter, Graffitti and Noise
Thursday 22 April 2004 CLLR SIR DAVID WILLIAMS, MR PETER HUNT and MR SIMON BAXTER Evidence heard in Public Questions 139 - 206
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee on Thursday 22 April 2004 Members present Mr Peter Ainsworth, in the Chair Mr Colin Challen Mrs Helen Clark Sue Doughty Mr Simon Thomas ________________ Memorandum submitted by The Local Government Association Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Cllr Sir David Williams (LD), Vice Chair of the LGA Environment and Regeneration Executive, Mr Peter Hunt, Director of Direct Services, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council and Mr Simon Baxter, Client and Enforcement Manager, Southwark (currently on secondment to the Home Office), The Local Government Association examined. Q139 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to the Committee, Sir David and Mr Hunt. Thank you very much for coming. Sir David, you very kindly gave evidence to our previous Inquiry on Environmental Crime in the Courts and so we are particularly grateful that you have come back to us today for the current Inquiry into Environmental Crime. I understand that Mr Baxter is on his way. Sir David Williams: We hope so. Q140 Chairman: We hope so too. We remember the robust performance he put in last time. Sir David Williams: Yes, I am sure he is more memorable than many of your witnesses. Q141 Chairman: We have not forgotten him, certainly. Can I begin by asking you about the consultations that have been issued by DEFRA and the way that these relate to the existing protocol? One of the ideas of the consultation is to embed the protocol - or an amended version of it - in statute. Do you think this implies that the protocol has not been working? Sir David Williams: I think it is part of a widespread realisation that we have all got to raise our game in this. The protocols and other pieces of instruction, guidance, whatever, are really only a means to an end which is combating fly-tipping which is seriously difficult to combat. I think there is a realisation that not only do we have to beef up the guidance and the protocols and so on, they do have to have some force behind them and some statutory status. There is a serious problem for local authorities and we simply have to do better. However, it is not just local authorities; this is not going to be solved unless there is complete coordination between all the official organisations and involving the public in a very much better way too. Q142 Chairman: Do you think that putting it into statute is actually going to help them? Sir David Williams: Yes, I do. Q143 Chairman: Do you think it is necessary to do that? Sir David Williams: I think so, yes. Q144 Chairman: Is there not a danger that by putting it into statute you build in inflexibilities? Sir David Williams: I suppose so. However, I think the advantages will outweigh that risk because it will be seen as something that all the organisations responsible for combating fly-tipping have got a very serious set of obligations put on them in a way that perhaps they have not seen before. Q145 Chairman: You said earlier that everyone needs to raise their game, but we have had quite a lot of evidence from other bodies that suggest that local government needs to raise its game more than most and that in some cases local authorities have not really been pulling their weight. Do you accept that? I see that Mr Hunt is shaking his head vigorously. Mr Hunt: I have a vested interest. Sir David Williams: I think that fly-tipping in rural authorities with low resources, very large amounts of countryside to look after, it is an almost impossible job and when you get a serious incident - a major fly-tipping incident - inevitably the public authorities (not just the local authority) look very inadequate in all this. I think it is easy to lay the blame, but it is a very difficult crime to combat, let alone prevent. As you know, the way that people think nowadays is that whenever something goes wrong there has to be someone to point the finger at. Q146 Chairman: Is it not made harder by the dual responsibilities of local government and the Environment Agency, and the gap between those is a gap that often fills up with fly-tipped waste and enables a blame game to take place because local government blames the Environment Agency for not doing enough and the Environment Agency says it is all local government's fault? Sir David Williams: I do not think that is a significant factor in it. There has been a considerable range of practice where smaller local authorities have let the Environment Agency do the prosecutions; big city authorities have dealt with virtually everything except the really major fly-tipping incidents; so there is a variation like. I do not think it is a demarcation problem; I think the two agencies do work well. Peter can probably give you some direct evidence. Mr Hunt: I can only speak for my authority, Blackburn and Darwin, and work with the Environment Agency in the North West. I have to say that we have not had an issue about whose responsibility a particular problem is. We work well together and we carry out a significant number of prosecutions in our own right. We do not detect a blame culture. I accept that the authority is very often in the firing line because it is seen as the body that has to sort out these problems, but there is not an issue in Blackburn and Darwin. Q147 Chairman: Welcome, Mr Baxter. Mr Baxter: I apologise for my lateness. I thought it was eleven o'clock. I have just rushed across from Queen Anne's Gate. Q148 Chairman: We are very pleased to see you. I guessed you were in Queen Anne's Gate because since we last met you have been seconded to the Home Office. Was this because of your performance in front of our Committee? Mr Baxter: I wish it were, but I have been there for about a year. Q149 Chairman: What work are you doing there? Mr Baxter: Linking envirocrime in with antisocial behaviour and the links to other sorts of criminality. Q150 Chairman: You are very welcome. Mr Baxter: Thank you. Q151 Mr Challen: Would you like to comment on the proposed £300 fixed penalty for failure to have the relevant duty of care paper work at hand for businesses and so on getting rid of waste? Sir David Williams: We welcome it and it is part of a wide-ranging series of measures we would like to see to try to change the odds between the ease with which you can get away with fly-tipping compared with the difficulty of prosecution or even prevention. I am sure Simon can tell you about this. Mr Baxter: I can whole heartedly agree with those sentiments. For many practitioners there is a process that you can go through, new powers that came in on 28 February last year (that empowered local authorities to check waste transfer notes) is quite laborious insofar as if you follow the good practice on enforcement you should warn people, you should publicise. I think that is right and proper, but many authorities are already doing that and yet there is still no uptake of commercial waste agreements or compliance with the duty of care. It would be beneficial if there were a form of explanatory notice, it fast-tracks the process of compliance certainly when it comes to littering. I know that a lot of authorities do not use the fixed penalty notice but in Southwark they do and quite successfully so. I think it is a fast-track way of getting people to comply with the legislation. It does seem a sensible way forward. Commercial waste agreement can be anything from a minimum of £100 per year for some bags anything up to several hundreds or thousands of pounds for very big businesses. The bigger businesses do comply - McDonalds, Marks and Spencer - but the small corner business or the garage who might be producing carcinogenic through their oil filters, it is not on their radar, so to speak. Despite publicity the garage owner says he is not worried and is not going to do anything about it. A £300 fixed penalty notice is a fast-track way of resolving that. Mr Hunt: One thing we have found with the duty of care notice is that it is a useful power that we have been given. We are suspecting - even more than suspecting - that people are getting retrospective duty of care notes because they are not sequentially numbered. Somebody can go along when they have been caught and then they go to a friendly disposer and get backdated notes to get them out of prosecution so as part of the law sequentially numbered notes would be useful. Q152 Mr Challen: Some businesses operating on the margins might try to evade this by giving some local householder a fiver to fill the boot and go and dump it somewhere. How would you deal with that under this system? People will try to evade these fixed penalty notices in one way or another. Mr Baxter: I think if it is domestic waste they are not bound by a duty of care so as a householder, if I have knocked down my garage and returfed my garden, there is no duty of care. If I then give that to a man in a van there is no duty of care on me as a householder but if you could prove that the person carrying the waste had done it for a profit - so he had been paid to carry that waste - then there is a duty of care on that person to be a registered waste carrier and also to have a waste transfer note. I do not want to pre-empt the questions I am going to be asked, but I do have some views around waste carriers and the use of vehicles. Q153 Mr Challen: I was going to come on to that, so you can say what you want to say about it now. Mr Baxter: I have a good example of why the legislation needs changing, updating and re-writing. The EPA was written 14 years ago. It is a great piece of legislation, however things have moved on. Companies have got slicker; the man in the van knows the loopholes and if we, as a society, are serious about stopping fly-tipping, we need to be slightly more robust in our approach. At the moment you can register as a waste carrier. If I get caught fly-tipping or a breach of my waste carrier's licence I think it is three strikes and then you are out. So, for example, I am Simon Baxter Limited, Waste Carriers, I get caught fly-tipping three times (or another breach of the licence), I can then start up David Williams Fly-Tipping and be a partner of that. The whole registration process for waste carriers needs to be looked at. If I had my way, any vehicle that was not a registered waste carrier and did not have a waste transfer note, the vehicle should be ceased immediately pending further investigation. What happens at the moment, the Environment Agency can get a warrant, so I have a vehicle that has been involved in fly-tipping, the Environment Agency and the local authorities get the warrant in a couple of hours, but that vehicle has gone. Once they know they have been caught or seen the registration may change, they have sold it within the last hour, it goes to a scrap yard and is resprayed. That is quite common practice. We do not want these vehicles to then go off; we would like the powers to seize immediately those vehicles that are carrying waste pending further investigation. You may think it is draconian. If it is Mr and Mrs Miggins who are taking their garden waste to the local tip they do not have to be registered waste carriers; that is a proper purpose. We have had CCTV footage in the past where local householders continue to dump and if that is a consistent problem then we may think about seizing the vehicle and keeping it pending further investigation. The other thing is, when these people are caught and there is one person that springs to mind when he was taken to court he was fined £500 and £500 costs at the Crown Court and then cleared off to somewhere else in Europe, but we gave him his vehicle back. That seems absolute nonsense to me because - to give a slightly extreme example - if a crack dealer is caught with a 9mm gun, half a pound of crack with the street value of a million pounds, that is seized but at the end of it we keep the gun and the crack and he does his ten years (hopefully) if not longer. However, when it is a fly-tipper we give him his vehicle back to go and commit more crime. That seems absolutely nonsensical to me. If we are serious about capturing this information and tying these people down, if you are not a registered waste carrier and you do not have a waste transfer note, you have every reason to have your vehicle seized until we are satisfied that you do. I have had registered waste carriers that are involved in fly-tipping. It is a step in the right direction to start reducing this type of envirocrime. What I saw in Sunderland yesterday was appalling and that is the national picture. I am in the very fortunate position that on secondment I am able to go to Burnley, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Brighton and Hove and I am not just talking from a Southwark perspective; this is a national perspective. I am sure my colleague from Blackburn would agree, would you not? Mr Hunt: I would. Q154 Mr Challen: A lot of people are quite determined by the very nature of their business - which is fly-tipping and probably making some money out of it - to get around all these rules and new penalties and registrations and things of that sort. Do you think that money raised from these penalties should be hypothecated to pay for more surveillance, more mini-cameras at known sites of fly-tipping and so on? Sir David Williams: It would certainly help, but the basic principle - we gave evidence about this before - is that we want escalating penalties. We have to have some serious deterrents on this all the more because it is a difficult crime to detect and prosecute and, combined with that, the increased temptations involved with fly-tipping because of the increased cost of legitimate disposal. Q155 Mr Thomas: There is one thing which slightly concerns me about what I am hearing here and also within the consultation paper as well. That is, where do we draw the line? Where, for example, in searching for ever more draconian or effective - it depends on your view of the law - or rigorous measures to deal with illegal fly-tippers, we start potentially to treat some of the victims as well as criminals. The obvious thing here is with private land where we have a huge problem with private land in inner city areas where there is complicity between private land owners and fly-tippers, whereas if you go to a rural area you have tipping happening on private land but the farmer or the land owner may have no idea that that is happening until he or she happens to come across it. Obviously the changes proposed in the consultation from DEFRA on that would introduce some idea of reasonableness, that a private land owner had taken all reasonable steps to stop fly tipping. Is it really the job of a land owner - no matter what land they own - to stop somebody else carrying out a crime? Should we not be focussing more firmly on the criminal who is carrying out that crime and not to drag an innocent party into it? I was just wondering what are your comments on that. Mr Baxter: I think that is a very interesting point and it is one that I have come across before. I think the waste should be cleared free of charge on the first occasion because I think that is right and proper; you have been a victim of a crime. If we did catch the person part of the punishment I think should be that he goes and clears it up at the weekend in his dodgy vehicle and pays for the disposal as well as getting punished in the courts. Once the land owner is aware that there is an issue on the land, I do think he has some responsibility to prevent further accumulation. I know there was one land owner recently - probably in the last two years - who let some travellers (I think that is the correct word) use his land to park their vehicles. I think they paid him £100 to let them park their vehicles on the land with access to the highway. Then he was hit for a bill of £20,000 because they had actually been using it for fly-tipping. I do think we need to be careful on that. I think it has to be balanced and proportionate. I know most local authorities would like to see a change in Section 59 (that is owners and occupiers of land). I think once you have been made aware that there is an issue with fly-tipping you should be taking steps to prevent further accumulations and that may be erecting a strong fence or some steel posts or some lumps of concrete (with some ivy climbing over the top to make it look nice). I do think land owners do have a responsibility. Q156 Mr Thomas: Why do they have that responsibility? In my own house I have responsibility towards my insurance company to make sure it is secure, but nobody is going to fine me for leaving the front door open and getting robbed, so why, if I were a land owner, do I have responsibility to stop a criminal coming on my land and doing criminal actions and then, if he trips over the concrete bollards, suing me for the duty of care? Mr Baxter: I do think it is a collective responsibility. It is the local authority's responsibility to stop and take a pro-active approach to reducing fly-tipping. I do think they should assist victims and witnesses of this type of envirocrime, but equally we need private land owners to take some responsibility themselves. It is no different from graffiti. There is graffiti on my wall and what are you, the council, going to do about it? Well, why do you not remove it? I think together we can make a difference. If you are just going to say that it is all down to the local authority and I am the poor victim, then I think that is a sorry state of affairs. Q157 Mr Thomas: I certainly accept what the local authority evidence has been in this Inquiry, and it is that attitude of it being someone else's problem all the time, but in this particular circumstance I am wondering whether we are trying to spread the blame and possibly getting to a situation where we are not focussing enough on the criminal. Mr Baxter: I take that as an issue but, equally, if we take a step back and prevent the waste from getting there in the first place - if you are not a registered waste carrier and you do not have a waste transfer note and you are carrying waste, you have every chance of having your vehicle seized - then I think that may start to change people's behaviour. Certainly, if I were driving through the country with an eight-wheeler and I knew the council, the police, the DVLA, customs and excise, the Environment Agency could be just round the corner, and I am going to have my eight-wheeler (which I have just paid £12000 for; it is an old wreck but new they go for up to £80,000 and I have heard that some change hands for £4000 or £5000, but they can make that in a couple of days) crushed and cut up or, if it is a brand new vehicle of some value then I think they should be sold on to legitimate business or auctioned off to pay towards costs. If we just go back to that, in here it says about escalating fines and repeat offences but when you get the people who say they have been made redundant because they have been caught fly-tipping, I do think we need to be slightly more creative in how we punish these individuals. It could be community service orders; we could start encouraging magistrates to withdraw their licences; I think under the Criminal Justice Sentencing Act which is fairly new - it was actually introduced for kerb crawling - but now it says for related offences. I think if you are using your vehicle to carry out criminality that would be a related offence and their licence should be removed as well. You can give me £1000 or £20000 fine but I am now on benefits and do not have the ability to pay, then it makes it meaningless. I do think it is a collective responsibility but if we can stop it at the source then the farmer or the countryside person who has his lovely cottage and four acres of land should not, hopefully, be affected. It does need to be that strong. Sir David Williams: Prevention is better than cure. Q158 Mr Challen: With the introduction of the end of vehicle life directive, I think for some people it might be a positive bonus to have their vehicle confiscated; it would probably save them some money. You have mentioned that you think there should be a range of these punishments available. What would be your preferred kind of punishment - I am addressing the whole panel - and certainly should one of those not be that fines should be increased and with the magistrates' powers to greatly increase the fine this would perhaps give the magistrates a better idea of the seriousness with which we treat these crimes? Sir David Williams: There are quite high limits on the fines but they do not go back to the local authority like fixed penalty notices, for instance, so there is not the same incentive for the local authority to go for that. The best solution if there are difficulties with not imposing a high fine is community service. This has been a big success in combating graffiti. A youth in my ward has just been doing a hundred hours community service - he is 21 actually - one of three delinquents who had been making a terrible mess in my ward. Q159 Chairman: Sir David, this Sub-committee is going to produce, to an expectant world, a report on environmental crime in the courts and sentencing and so on in about a fortnight's time so I would prefer it if the Committee did not explore territory which we have already covered. Can I just come back to this duty of care that you want to see imposed on householders? I am not quite clear what that comprises. Mr Baxter: There was a case recently where a man had re-done his back garden and had about 20 bags of rubbish. A man came along and said, "Would you like me to remove that? Give me £50 and I'll remove it for you." The person actually needed a skip which would be £125 to £150 - depending on where you live and the size of skip, but that is the general rule of thumb - so this person opted to pay the person £50 and did not have to lift it into a skip or anything and this young man took it away in his van and then fly-tipped it probably five streets away. Q160 Chairman: So he gets caught and he says, "I got it from 47 Mickledever Avenue". So you go round to 47 Mickledever Avenue and say "It's your fault". Is that how it works? Mr Baxter: That individual is actually the victim of a crime. My understanding is that if there is a duty to householders it makes them far more aware that if you do come knocking on my door you need to be a registered waste carrier. I am not wholeheartedly convinced of the argument of duty of care for householders. Q161 Chairman: That is what we wanted to establish. Mr Baxter: I do think they are victims, but I think they do need to be careful who they give their waste to. It may be that we think about a campaign to highlight that each borough or parish council must do campaigning on ensuring that if you do give your waste to someone they are registered waste carriers. If not, you could be a victim and be interviewed by the local authority involved with fly-tipping. I think that is probably a more balanced approach. Q162 Chairman: It is not an enforceable duty, as envisaged. Mr Baxter: I do not think it would be particularly fair, if I am the victim of a crime. Mr Hunt: At home we have tried, through the local newspaper, publicity drives to say that it is their duty to understand where that waste is going to and merely giving it to some chap who happens to call and offers a cheap deal is suspicious because there are proper ways to dispose of waste, and people should ask for the right documentation to make sure it is going the right way. We are trying to get that message across to the individuals that they have a responsibility. Q163 Mr Thomas: Would it be easier to do this if there was some immediately identifiable national badge or something? To ask a householder to find out about a registered waste disposer, they will forget very quickly what they are supposed to ask. However, if you say you have to have a green badge or something to dispose of waste then you could get that round the minds of the public and they could ask if the person who turned up at the door if they had the green badge that shows they can take away waste. Would it be simpler if we had some sort of scheme like that, that was identified across the United Kingdom? Mr Baxter: That is an interesting point because, getting back to the waste carriers licence, I am a waste carrier, I get a waste carriers licence but I have eight vehicles and that is when it starts becoming slightly foggy: on that day that you caught my vehicle it was actually hired out to a company I met in the pub. This does happen quite frequently. My view is that you are quite right: there should be a waste carriers licence per vehicle and it should be like a tax disc that is renewed yearly, bright orange, perhaps, like a disabled car sticker or a tax disc that is clearly visible for each vehicle that I own. The householder would then think, oh yes, I must look for the orange sticker. I think that would be sensible. Q164 Mr Challen: Moving on to some of the demolition and construction waste and things of that sort, do you think the system is too complicated at the moment for disposing of these things? I ask that question because I have had a constituent who bought a house on a filled-in railway cutting, filled in with all sorts of demolition rubble and other kinds of waste, and it appears, due to the fact that his house is now tipping over, that the job was not done properly. Are there just too many people involved in this case - the Environment Agency, all the different departments of the local authority from planning through to all sorts of other things - and for the ordinary person the system is far too complex and people are getting away with murder. Sir David Williams: Part of it is a reflection on the price of land and the desperate desire to build on every bit of railway siding. Mr Hunt: In respect of that particular case, are you suggesting that someone has illegally placed the material onto which a house has been built? Q165 Mr Challen: I think in this case someone would have had a licence to fill that cutting in and they probably said to a lot of other people, "Help us get this fairly quickly; come along and dump stuff there because there is nobody there to check it or monitor it and the testing of materials dumped there just does not seem to happen". Mr Hunt: If it went back to before the licensing of landfill sites, that could well be the case. In recent years the monitoring of what goes into a landfill site is much more rigourous. Speaking from our point of view, we have an inner landfill site and it is monitored to the hilt so people are fully aware of what is in there. If someone then, in times to come, wants to build on that land then there are an awful lot of engineering surveys to be done before it would ever be deemed feasible to build on. You also have to take into account the potential cases that may come out as well. I suspect that what you have got is a problem with a site that is quite old and pre-licence. Sir David Williams: The first house I bought was on a former gravel pit, largely filled with bomb damage rubble, but there were some subsidence problems and the houses were built on big concrete rafts. Is it not caveat emptor in cases like this? Mr Baxter: Some people carrying hardcore would say that it is not waste, we are recycling it, we are going to fill a farmer's pathway. This waste has been put there; there is no control over it and it is going off to be foundations for a new house that is going to be built. Again, when does it become waste? The definition of waste may need to be looked at, but in my view unless you have a waste transfer notice, you may say you are recycling it - it is the same thing with tyres when they go outside the UK, because they fail the UK standards they may be okay in Ethiopia - and this is what you get time and time again; it is not waste. What may seem waste to you is not waste to me because we are recycling. It is the same with somebody's hardcore; it is not waste, we are going to take it to a farmer's land because he has asked us to fill in his yard because it is very muddy at the moment. I do think we need to look at that as well. Q166 Mr Challen: You clearly agree that there is considerable confusion about definitions here. Have you made representations to DEFRA, particularly from local government, about this? Has it been a problem for councils to deal with? Mr Baxter: My understanding is that there are discussions on-going. There is a cross-cabinet group looking at fly-tipping at the moment, I believe. I have sat on one or two - DFT, DEFRA, OPDM have been there - and they are talking about construction waste. Q167 Mr Challen: In the context of fly-tipping? Mr Baxter: Yes. Q168 Mr Challen: This is authorised waste that councils will be aware of where people are maybe stretching definitions. Mr Baxter: As I say, there are discussions going on, but I do think it needs to be tidied up. If it is construction waste that is going to be recycled and used as part of a construction site there should perhaps be a special kind of notice about it: it is a waste transfer note however it is being used at this site. At the moment it is a free for all with construction waste. Q169 Mr Challen: In terms of vehicles that are displaying these special badges that you would like to see, do you think that local authorities perhaps (or anybody else such as the police) should have stop and search powers to pull these vehicles up and see what they are carrying, where they are taking it to and where it is from? Sir David Williams: That is the only way it is going to work. Mr Baxter: The powers are already there; they came in within the Anti-Social Behaviour Act recently. I think they were enacted on 31 March. They do have the powers to stop, search and seize vehicles that they suspect - or maybe suspected - are involved in fly-tipping, but it does not go far enough. I guess it comes back to what I originally said that if you are carrying waste and you are not a registered carrier and you do not have the adequate paperwork, then your vehicle should be seized pending enquiries to verify that you are who you say you are and what you say you are. Q170 Mr Challen: Are there any areas that this consultation missed out on that you thought should be addressed? Sir David Williams: We have a concern about the related area of the EU directive on hazardous waste. At worst we think we may finish up with an embarrassment like we did with CFCs and fridges where in the country as a whole we were caught unawares about this. That is a loosely related area, but I presume you have already had some evidence about that. Q171 Chairman: Yes, the Environment Agency expressed great concern about this whole area. Sir David Williams: Yes. Q172 Mrs Clark: If I can widen the topic not to exclude fly-tipping but also to include other types of environmental crime such as anti-social behaviour, do you actually think that local authorities are doing all they could within existing resources? It is very easy to say that what they really need is more money across the board, but is that really fair? Sir David Williams: I think that local authorities have done quite a lot better. Take graffiti, the simple example, I would have thought that most local authorities have doubled or quadrupled the amount of money they are spending on this and in my own authority we have had better results from this by rapid removal of graffiti. We have also mobilised the local community in action days as well which I think I mentioned the last time we were here. It is patchy, to be fair. Peter and I were talking about dog fouling before we came in. We think considerable progress has been made about that. Mr Hunt: I am not saying that we have it perfect, by any means; we have an awful lot still to do. My local authority woke up to the problems some 18 months ago and made positive moves in the budget process to direct monies in this direction, largely fuelled by the views of the public, by CPA inspections. We started directing significant sums and started a campaign. Q173 Chairman: One of the questions in our mind is why 18 months ago a whole load of local authorities suddenly woke up to the fact that there was a problem. The problem has been there for a long time, why are the solutions so recent? Sir David Williams: I do not think they are that recent; I just think it has got a much bigger public concern and there is an obligation and a pressure on the local authorities to do it. I think they have been doing it for a long time. Q174 Mrs Clark: I am finding more and more that what I am getting on the doorstep is not huge burglaries but, frankly, dog muck. I am getting it from house after house after house and also the state of, say, the garden four houses up that has suddenly become an absolute tip. This is really grinding on at people now. They are becoming ground down by it. Mr Baxter: To answer your question, "Are councils doing enough?" certainly ENCAMS have shown that only a third of local authorities actually take any action on fly-tipping which is disappointing. However, I think that many have found it difficult to understand and work their way through the legislation. Many do not have the political vision to tackle these issues. We talk about anti-social behaviour and is it the crack dealer, is it prostitution? No, actually it is dog poo, it is the fly-posting, the fly-tipping, the graffiti, the abandoned vehicles, noisy neighbours. MORI has shown that time and time again and authorities are now waking up to that. Fly-tipping has been here for many a year as has graffiti and fly-posting, but it is people's perceptions of crime that is prevalent. Recently I went to Birmingham - this is a side issue but it is quite interesting - and I sat next to quite an elderly lady probably in her mid-70s. She said to me, "Where are you going?" I said, "Birmingham". She said, "Oh, right. I am off to Ireland." I said, "Oh, good, that will be nice". She said, "Where do you live?" I said, "Camberwell". She said, "That's very posh, isn't it? That's in Surrey, isn't it?" I said, "No, it's between Peckham and Brixton". "Oh, okay." I said, "Where do you live?" She said, "Orpington". I said, "Orpington's very posh. I worked there many years ago." She said, "Not any more, dear. Very unsafe." I said, "Why's that?" She said, "Graffiti everywhere. Not safe to go out." I think that says it all. There is this fear that if I go out something is going to happen to me. I think that typifies the whole issue around envirocrime. As I said, I am fortunate to get the national picture and it is about creating a can-do culture; it is about having a clear political vision at a local level that we do not tolerate envirocrime in our area. I think there are some very good authorities that are very pro-active in resolving it. Certainly Camden are very good; Westminster are very good; Kensington and Chelsea are very good as are Newham, but it is very hit and miss and it is very local. I do think for those authorities that do want to take a pro-active approach the legislation needs to be changed to encourage other people to start taking a lead. Things are beginning to move. Q175 Mrs Clark: On that perhaps you could encourage Lambeth to be a bit more pro-active. Mr Baxter: I live in Lambeth but I do not work for them anymore. Q176 Mrs Clark: If you could have more money, if there was a possibility of extra resourcing, where should it go? Sir David Williams: In this area what I would put money into is not local authorities directly; I would have a big anti-litter campaign because litter irritates people almost as much as graffiti. Local authorities have been criticised by ENCAMS for not doing a very good job as if it were the local authorities who were dropping the litter almost. We think in a way they have not seen the wood for the trees because, to go back to what I said earlier, if the litter was not dropped in the first place you would not have the problem. Something like £500 million is spent across the local authorities in England street cleaning and all these sorts of areas. A very small proportion of that spent on an aggressive publicity anti-litter campaign would make an enormous difference. You have to change the climate. Litter is probably not as difficult as some of the other things, but if you got a culture of not dropping litter we would save hundreds of millions of pounds of public money. We would not need to be saying that we need more money to get up to a certain standard. Graffiti is very much more visible and very much more irritating to people generally and that is part of the reason for the great irritation and pubic protests. Mr Baxter: I think campaigning is important; you could spend a million pounds on campaigning. However, I do think you need it to have teeth. Youth litter is an issue and if they are not going to get punished for it they will continue to do it. I think we do need to change hearts and minds. There have been some great campaigns up and down the United Kingdom trying to do that, but ultimately this comes back to firm enforcement on those who are responsible for dropping litter. I do not think it is about resources necessarily; it is not about flooding local authority with money. It is about realigning your services to meet the needs of that community and thinking creatively how you can overcome these issues. Many authorities will have sections to look at refuse and cleansing and where the services are in-house they could merge those and improve their skills and training to identify envirocrime. Why not empower your local road sweeper and the mobile crews who have to pick up these bags on a daily basis to start issuing fixed penalty notices and make them environmental bounty hunters. That is something we did in Southwark. It is not just flooding a local authority with more money - here is another £3 million to resolve this issue - it is going back to the source, punishing those responsible for putting it there in the first place, looking at the services you currently have. You could think about using Trading Standards officers and Environmental Health officers when they visit premises to do food safety checks, that they can also issue a Section 34 notice asking them what happens to their waste. It is about thinking creatively. Any additional money is always welcome, but it is not just about money, it is about how you use your resources. We have an education team within my team at Southwark. I have an enforcement team and an education team who go into schools to talk about graffiti, fly-posting, fly-tipping; do not play in abandoned vehicles if they are burnt out, when you are playing football in the park watch out for needles and dog poo. We need to get them to think in primary schools, secondary schools, through businesses; it goes right the way through everything. I think campaigning is very important. Education is very important. However it still comes back to "I know if I do this, something is going to happen". Q177 Mrs Clark: I think you have really answered my next question which is that it is really about mainstreaming. It has to go through the centre of all policies throughout the local authority, not just a one-off campaign - however successful - not just a time limited strategy. Sir David Williams: Peter has been involved in a campaign and has brought some literature. Mr Hunt: I endorse what my two colleagues have said. It is about education. It is about getting the message across that is everywhere for everyone to see. It then has to be followed by the enforcement side of it. What we are trying to do in Blackburn and Darwen is badge everything. It is identifying that this is what it is all about so that whenever they see that badge it is about "Thrash the Trash" message (forgive the wording but it catches with people) and it really has focussed people's minds and attention. As we were talking before about dog fouling, five years ago people would allow their dog to foul and probably not look around to see if they had been seen; now they may allow the dog to foul but they look around to see if they have been seen and they pick it up if they have. We need to get that with litter. I travel to France quite a lot and there is nowhere near that same problem there. We are all Europeans; why does it happen there? It is because it is in the culture and that is what we have to change. Q178 Mrs Clark: In terms of anti-social behaviour, is it just a youth thing do you think? Sir David Williams: No. Q179 Mrs Clark: Is it predominantly young people? Mr Baxter: Littering or anti-social behaviour? Q180 Mrs Clark: Anti-social behaviour. Sir David Williams: There has been an ASBO against a pensioner. Mr Baxter: I think it goes across all social boundaries and age groups to be fair. Q181 Mrs Clark: You have talked quite a bit about education and how important that is. I would say - speaking as an ex-teacher - that nowadays there is more and more on the curriculum both at primary and secondary about the importance of monitoring your environment and caring for your environment but it seems to me that it is not working, is it? Young people still hang around on those street corners, kicking tins and behaving in a very intimidating and anti-social way. Is that because they see it all on the television and are just mimicking those sorts of patterns? Sir David Williams: If they mimicked what they saw on television they would not just be hanging around street corners, I suspect, so we had better be grateful that they are mostly standing still. It is a culture thing, is it not? It is impossible to say when these gradual changes happened. I personally do not think the intimidating gangs of teenage boys on street corners are any different from when I used to do it 50 years ago. I think that we are too aware of some of the potential problems now. Fear of crime is a phrase that is often used. Some things are worse; some things are better. We must not let up on the education and that is really where you are going to succeed. Q182 Chairman: The perception is that it has got a lot worse. I was talking to some people locally recently who are actually frightened of telling people to pick up litter because they are going to get an earful of verbal abuse. I am not sure that you would have done that 50 years ago. Sir David Williams: No, I probably would have picked up the litter. Chairman: Exactly. Simon Thomas? Q183 Mr Thomas: We obviously have a long way to go when an Oscar-winning actor can take a dog to a park to do his business, so education is clearly a key to this. Mr Baxter earlier in the evidence said that this was all pretty hit and miss even at local authority level and really it is a question of getting the LGA to think about the evidence we have been receiving. We have had some very good examples - we have just had a very good one shown to us of a badge campaign - Whereas we have also received evidence of bad or poor practice within local authorities, authorities that have not caught up. Clearly there is a variance in budgetary constraints and the sort of authority and whether you have a lot of derelict land or whether you have a lot of inner city areas or whatever it may be. What is the LGA doing to actually promote national guidelines and promote best practice throughout authority areas? Can you give us some positive examples of where now those poorer performing authorities are actually being brought up? Sir David Williams: One of the things the LGA is doing and is actively involved in is the protocol about fly-tipping illegal waste. The only practical way that local authorities can get to grips with this, negotiate with ministries and national organisations is through the Local Government Association. However, we accept there is very variable practice; there is a very variable level of offences too which is the other thing that inevitably you will get differences about. Now we have websites we have done quite a lot more on best practice. One of the things that we have to do is to get at councillors as well as council officers and typically you need one page one screen information sheets if you are going to do it through councillors who have busy lives to run and much prefer things on one sheet of the paper or one screen of a PC. The Improvement and Development Agency - which is a connected organisation to the Local Government Association - has a series of items or issues on one screen per issue which is very effective. IDA knowledge is the overall name of this and councillors are repeatedly told about this. The Local Government Association publishes at some cost a weekly magazine that goes to every councillor and the educative value of that is very significant. They are put in touch with best practice, they get articles written by other councillors in there, they get advertisements about things like IDA knowledge and so on. That dissemination is easier and that is something we take very seriously in the LGA. Q184 Mr Thomas: Can you see a rising of performances? Sir David Williams: Yes. If you can get at councillors in this they can see some direct political benefit from running successful, high publicity campaigns about things that people are concerned about as we have been talking about today. Q185 Chairman: We were interested in noise as an issue but it would seem that nobody else is because we have had hardly any memoranda back dealing with noise and very few people have actually raised it in evidence sessions. Is there not a problem with noise? Sir David Williams: There is a problem with noise. The main problem I am aware of in my own borough of Richmond-upon-Thames is noisy parties - apart from aeroplanes and night flights (we won against the Department of Transport four times and still they went to the European Court of Appeal) - and felt we had to do something about it using an anti-noisy party patrol. The difficulty we have had is that it is not the police that enforces, it is the local authority. You have to have an environmental health officer with a sound meter and so on. The noisy party patrol has been successful and this is, if you like, an urban area problem but it can be extremely irritating and local authorities have had some success in prosecuting this. We would recommend noisy party patrols at least every summer weekend, but again it is quite expensive with the overtime for the environmental health officers in all this. Q186 Chairman: These are literally environmental health officers in a van driving around neighbourhoods. Sir David Williams: It is basically using the borough's control centre that handles all out of hours emergencies and calls like this with links to the police station because people normally ring the police first. Apart from aircraft noise that is the problem we have had in Richmond-upon-Thames. Mr Baxter: Some of the complaints I have had recently have not been about noisy parties but actually about tenants or residents of adjoining houses and it is sometimes just poor construction. I was dealing with a case of an elderly couple saying that there were young children running up and down upstairs and they are now both on medication. They tried to speak to the person upstairs who said that they are quiet but they are six and seven years old. They have to run up and down. They live on an estate and it is very difficult and the sound insulation is very poor. I do think ultimately - and it may be slightly extreme - that the way I have suggested these people go round it is that they speak to the neighbour again and actually step up some action because it may be that she is winding the couple up and they actually think about using an ASBO or acceptable behaviour contract; you can be subject to an ASBO for anything that causes harassment, alarm or distress. I think this legislation which is very new can be very effective in reducing that sort of behaviour. I live in a semi-detached house. I am very lucky and for the last 20 years I had a pensioner living next to me who has passed away and there is now a young family living there. They are very nice people but their children - young boys - are probably as noisy as my sister and I were to him. We are a small family and we are very quiet but I can hear the doors shutting and sometimes I think that an ASBO would be useful but I do not think that is a good way for neighbourly relations to form. Sometimes it can be annoying: doors slamming, "Mum, he's strangling me again!" which is what I often hear. Q187 Mrs Clark: I am afraid that is just children just being human children. If you are going to go down the route that it should be encouraged or even suggested that children should be kitted out with kids' slippers at all times then I think that is madness. I think there is a huge difference between that and, for example, the couple who are screaming and yelling and throwing things. That is anti-social behaviour, particularly if it is sustained. Mr Baxter: I was being light hearted on that one; my neighbours are brilliant. I accept that I live in central London, I am very lucky but sometimes the noise does get slightly annoying. In the case of the pensioners I think it is slightly different especially if they are being wound up. I do agree that many boroughs have some great work that goes on to reduce that. Q188 Chairman: Are there any new powers that you would like to have to deal with noise? Sir David Williams: I think the Anti-Social Behaviour Order is a good way forward because unless they were council tenants - as they often were - and were extremely noisy neighbours and were forced to move, the only thing you could really do at the end of the day was take out an injunction. It had to be really extreme behaviour to justify that and ASBOs are a useful intermediate step on that. However, we do have to live and let live. Q189 Mr Challen: I just have a comment on noisy motorbikes. New laws were introduced to limit the decibel levels of motorbikes. They are usually the smaller motorbikes; people who can afford a big one generally are not bothered about altering their exhaust systems to make more noise. I do not know if you have any comments on this, but it seems to me that that legislation has made no difference whatsoever because it is such a difficult thing to deal with because you cannot chase them very easily and if you do get hold of them we are often told that the equipment to measure the noise is not available or is too expensive or whatever. Mr Baxter: The Police Reform Act has recently been amended. It was introduced to prevent motorbikes being driven up and down on estates erratically by youngsters or over a field or through a park. It gives the police the power to seize them and ultimately destroy them. On the first occasion they are warned and then on the second occasion they are seized if it is that same person. I think the legislation is there, it just needs to be encouraged to be used far more effectively than it currently is, certainly with motorbikes. It is not about decibels; my understanding is that if it causes a nuisance they can seize it. Q190 Sue Doughty: Just a very brief point about the 24-hour society. I do not know about your experience but my experience in the surgery is generally about people running appliances at three o'clock in the morning and things like that and also getting any proof that this is going on. I just wondered whether we were seeing an increase in different sorts of behaviour which are acceptable for one person but not for another, but leading to these problems where one person cannot sleep because the washing machine is running on the other side of the party wall. Sir David Williams: I have had one or two cases as a ward councillor from this. I do not think it has got significantly worse despite the 24-hour society. The little experience I have had is that you tend to get blocks of flats that are largely people who have unsocial hours or ten flats, three air hostesses, stockbrokers getting up at four o'clock in the morning. It is not an increasing problem but it is a background problem that members of Parliament and local councillors will get on an intermittent basis in their case work. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed; you have been most helpful and we are very grateful. Mr Hunt, thank you for the papers you have brought for us. Witness: Ms Jan Berry, Chairman of the Police Federation, examined. Chairman: Welcome to the Committee, Ms Berry, and thank you very much for your patience. I am sorry the last session went on rather longer than we expected so we have rather less time with you than we otherwise would wish. Colin Challen? Q191 Mr Challen: Is it your understanding that environmental crimes are on the increase or is it simply that we are taking more notice of them? Do you see any discernable trends? Ms Berry: I think the fashion of environmental crime changes over periods. I do not necessarily think there is a huge increase in general. I think we are far more aware of environmental crime today. It is spoken about in our newspapers and on television programmes so our awareness is there, but I do think the fashion changes from time to time. Q192 Mr Challen: Do you think this extra awareness has been reflected in the way the police handle environmental crimes? Ms Berry: Yes. I do not think police gave it a very high priority. We were not being counted on it; it was not in the National Policing Plan and therefore it did not come towards the top of our priorities. I think that was a mistake because I think the environment in which we all live is very important in how crime manifests itself. Unless you look after crime and the environment at a very local level then all aspects of policing both at a local level and a national level will not work properly. Q193 Mr Challen: Do you think the Anti-Social Behaviour Act will make a great deal of difference in this? It has given the police a lot more power to do things but very often it takes a long time for a new act to filter through to the grass roots. Ms Berry: I think that is true. I think the tools are all there and it has happened over a period of time. I do not think the Anti-Social Behaviour Act in isolation from other things that have happened would necessarily be effective. I think the crime reduction disorder partnerships are also very effective and it really depends on the commitment that all of the partners give to the partnerships and using the different tools that are now available to them and how they then identify their local issues and how those tools can be of use in their own localities. I think the tools are there; it needs commitment from the partners to work together and then I think we can make some real inroads into local environmental problems. Q194 Mr Challen: As a matter of routine would you expect a police constable patrolling a street to stop somebody and take details from them and so on if they dropped a piece of litter? Ms Berry: I would like to see a police constable walking on the street. Q195 Mr Challen: In my constituency you do see a few. Ms Berry: We are seeing more and I think that is absolutely great. I think we - I mean society in general - did a huge disservice by devaluing the actual patrol function over a number of years and I think we have paid the cost of that. That is why we are now seeing police uniforms back on the streets, whether they be full police officers or community support officers. We are now seeing a visible police presence on the streets. Q196 Mr Challen: The reason I ask the question is that now we have PCSOs who are patrolling the streets - and we do see quite a lot of them in Leeds - is there a tendency possibly for police constables to take themselves a bit more seriously and think that these low level crimes can be dealt with by the lower level employees of the police service? Ms Berry: I think there is always a danger in compartmentalising who is going to be responsible for what. The patrol function is very important and if you come upon something I think you need to understand how you are going to deal with that. Whether you are a police officer or a PCSO you need to have the skills to be able to deal with that. What is effective is the way in which a lot of partners are working together in community units now and they are actually focussing on the areas not necessarily of greatest need but where there are more problems than others. Like any other walk of life, you have to prioritise and that is what partners are now sitting down to do. Q197 Mrs Clark: To start with I am very pleased that you have given some value back to patrolling. In fact, I am going on three patrols this weekend; I thought you would like to know that. Following on, do you agree with what has been called the "broken windows" theory, that is if you have a run down, shabby and generally degraded environment it is actually going to spawn first low-level crime which ever increases in gravity? Ms Berry: Yes I do. There is no doubt that the first piece of damage that is done to a property or an area, or graffiti that is put onto the wall, takes longer to get there than the last piece of graffiti does. There has been a huge amount of research over the years that demonstrates that if something looks neat and tidy people think twice about damaging that. However, once it is damaged it escalates very quickly. Q198 Mrs Clark: Some of the information that we have received during the process of this Inquiry has led us to believe very much that perhaps local authorities turned a blind eye too much when all this was starting and now they are very much reaping the consequences and have largely lost control of the problem. Would you agree? Ms Berry: I think it is very easy to fall into a blame culture and I think there a lot of different people who are responsible and I think we all try to blame everybody else and relinquish ourselves of responsibility. However, I think as a society we have tended to look at everybody else to solve our problems without looking at ourselves and local authorities - and the police for that matter - and everybody else can be part of that. What I think has become very clear is that we actually understand far better as a society today what this low level crime, this anti-social behaviour and generally feeling not very proud of our environment or our neighbourhood, what effect that has. I think local authorities and police and all the other partners have some responsibility here, but there is also some civic responsibility on individuals. It is beneficial to come second because you can hear what other people have said before you and I was interested to hear reference to education. There probably is more education today than ever before but what is also really important is that that gets reinforced by parents and there is a balance of messages going across and if it is just the police giving the message and it is not being reinforced across the board then I do not think it is going to be very effective. Q199 Mrs Clark: Going back to the role of police and police strategies, do you think there is some confusion going on here and that the emphasis on targets et cetera - you have to meet such and such a target otherwise you will not get your funding - has actually contributed to taking the average police officer off the beat and off the street and perhaps in the office studying figures and percentages et cetera, do you think that has contributed to the growth in crime? I certainly do. Ms Berry: I think you and I probably speak with one voice. I am absolutely convinced it has. There is no doubt that what gets counted gets done and if something is more difficult to count then it is less likely to be done. The quality of life issues which are low level crime - but I do not think we ever saw it as being low level crime - are not so easy to count; the quality of life issues are not so easy to count and therefore they have been given a lower priority. Then they were given such a low priority they were not given any attention at all. That, I think, has had an effect and we are now having to recover the situation and work together to do something about it. Q200 Mrs Clark: Perhaps in our report I would like to think we could stress that and perhaps have some effect on the Home Office because, as I see it, local forces are reacting - quite naturally - to the type of direction they are getting from the Home Office on these matters and I do not think the Home Office have actually got the message. Ms Berry: To give you an example which is not exactly on environmental crime, we measure how quickly we answer a telephone call; we measure how many calls we receive; we measure how quickly we get there; we do not actually measure how well we deal with it. We do not measure whether people are satisfied with the service and how we talk to them and unless we start doing that type of quality stuff then I do not think we are going to make real inroads. Q201 Sue Doughty: We were talking earlier about the problem of young people and we had some views from the previous witnesses. How far do you consider anti-social behaviour to be a youth problem? Ms Berry: I think we are aware of it more as a youth problem because that is what gets the publicity and I think someone referred earlier on to an ASBO being given to a pensioner, and that is also true. If you look at anti-social behaviour it does go across the whole range of society and all age groups. That said, all of us in this room have had to grow up and we all go through different stages in that process and there is no doubt that street corners and anti-social behaviour does have a huge impact and it is predominantly young people who are involved in that type of external anti-social behaviour. The nuisance neighbours I think is something that goes into different age groups. Q202 Sue Doughty: We have seen police officers getting more involved on the education side. What sort of feedback are you getting? What are the police themselves saying about this? Ms Berry: We talk all the time to police officers but we were talking to some particularly in the Salford area yesterday around this issue and they are really enthusiastic about it. Where police officers are put into situations in schools, working with different partners, they can see some real results at the end of what they are doing. They are getting job satisfaction and they are seeing the environment in which they are working improve as well so I think there is some really good news coming back from it. Q203 Sue Doughty: Would you like more powers to deal with some of the things we have been talking about: graffiti, fly-posting, littering? We have been talking about the problems the local government has; what is the police take on this one? Ms Berry: I think in the main the powers that we have now are sufficient. When the Anti-Social Behaviour Bill was going through Parliament we did look to have a more preventative power so that if we were predicting anti-social behaviour we could do something about that. The way that has come through into the Act is that an area has to be designated, it has to be designated by a superintendent and I think we were looking for there to be a more immediate power for a police officer to prevent something at the time. I am told by my colleagues who are working very closely with the Anti-Social Behaviour Act that they feel that all the tools are there in the toolkit and it is not just a matter of powers, it is about how the partners work together using powers as a last resort; it is about how you actually try to deter people and defer people at an earlier stage to when you have actually got to use powers. Q204 Sue Doughty: We were talking about partnerships and the split that we have between the police and local government. How effective do you find that relationship is? Do you find that you have conflicts in terms of what your priorities are? I know that my local police service is working very hard to deal with these things now but they also have the big picture to deal with: drug crime and all sorts of other things. Do you find that you are able to work closely with local government or do you find this change in priorities works against effective management? Ms Berry: There are always going to be competing priorities and you do need to prioritise, but I think the skill in this is about getting the balance between local community needs and national needs. For example, if you have a cocaine problem in your own area, it is not just confined to your area; there are links to other boroughs, there are links to other police areas. The skill in policing that has to be in how you take local information and intelligence and use that and combat it at a local level, but also to ensure that as those drugs are coming in from somewhere that that information can go to a national level as well. For policing to be most effective then you need to have a balanced approach at all levels of policing, both in an operational sense and also an intelligence sense. Q205 Sue Doughty: Are we trying to ask the police too much in terms, particularly, of the environmental crime when they are stretched and working hard to manage themselves through their situation. I have a lot of respect for the way the police have reconfigured to do this, but it is asking a huge amount. Ms Berry: I do not think we are asking too much. Getting rid of some of the bureaucracy would be extremely helpful because then police officers could do the jobs they are here to do. We have far too many people counting things at the moment and not enough people doing it. Unless you do provide a balanced approach then you will just be coming up with initiatives for the day and not actually integrating any of this stuff. There are some really good partnerships between police and local authorities and there are also some which do not work so well. My take on that is that that is largely not down to the structure or the provisions or the law or anything else; it is largely down to the personalities involved in those structures. If anyone can change the personalities and how they can be motivated that might be helpful, but there are some really good partnerships and some really good results happening out there. Q206 Chairman: Thank you. I am afraid we have been beaten by the clock and I know that some of my colleagues want to get down to the Chamber. We are extremely grateful to you for giving your time and wisdom. There may be some further questions which we would like to put to you in writing. I do not think you have submitted a memorandum. Ms Berry: I would be happy to do that. Chairman: That would be terrific. Thank you very much indeed. |