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Lord Dixon-Smith: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the Minister for his clear exposition of the Bill and for the benefits that he expects it to bring. There is no doubt that in a sense it is a politically seductive Bill, provided that you do not look too closely. The real question is not whether this is a good Bill, but how good the Bill is and whether we can make it a better one. The answer to that, of course, is yes. The function of this House is to consider legislation, to pick up any problems, and to make improvements.
Like the Minister, I express the hope that we will have the time to make that possible. I am sure that we shall have many interesting discussions about various aspects of the Bill. But we all acknowledge the position we are in, and we may not be granted that time. My feeling on that is that if we do not have enough time, it will be a disadvantage rather than an advantage. However, that is where we stand and there is nothing to be done about it. These matters are out of our hands, and perhaps that is just as well.
The Minister has rightly pointed out that society already spends huge sums on the areas covered by the Bill. The Local Government Association reports that each year it collects some 30 million tonnes of litter from the streets. I find that rather hard to believe, but there it is. Figures that I have been given show that the cost of dealing with that litter is £450 million a year. Abandoned vehicles, which seem to increase year on year, currently cost £27 million a year to deal with. In 2002–03 some 310,000 vehicles were disposed of, making the cost of each disposal £830. One can only wonder at the validity of such a figure.
The removal of graffiti in London is reported to cost £23 million per annum. That is not what is spent by local authorities, but what it costs London. However, that figure could be immensely inflated if one were to take into account the damage to property and the adverse effect on property values. London boroughs spend on average around £204,000 a year on the removal of graffiti. Across London that amounts to £7 million, but that sum bears no relationship to the actual cost of graffiti. Of course, much of it is cleared by property owners and so forth. For what it is worth, the authority in Newcastle estimates that every time it is called out to deal with a graffiti problem, it costs £100.
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The casual approach of society to this wretched matter of litter is already costing a great deal of money. Will the Bill help? In part it depends on the willingness of society to pay because the Bill imposes increased costs.
The Government are a major contributor to local government expenditure. Some of us have taken part in the annual negotiations. They are always fraught with difficulty. There never seems to be enough money for local government to do the things that it ought to do; still less is there ever additional money to do the additional things that local government ought to do. Local councillors also come under pressure. We seem to have done away with capping, but it does not reduce the coercive pressure that is put on authorities to contain their expenditure within limits that governments think are acceptable.
What does the Bill do? It provides a revenue stream to local government from the fixed penalty notices—I refer to a Defra figure, which the Minister will undoubtedly recognise—which is a little short of £5 million per annum, as far as it can be calculated. However, that is not really the purpose of the fixed penalty notices scheme. It seems to me that the real purpose is to provide a positive disincentive to people to chuck litter about, dump their cars and so on. However, that relies on enforcement to be effective. Who will carry out the enforcement? Clause 30(1)(a) refers to,
"an employee of the authority who is authorised in writing by the authority for the purpose of giving notices under section 43(1)".
"any person who, in pursuance of arrangements made with the authority, has the function of giving such notices".
"any employee of such a person who is authorised in writing by the authority for the purpose of giving such notices".
Who are these people? If they are not real people, they are nothing. I have given the matter some thought. Perhaps the Minister will come up with something more. I thought of environmental health officers but their work, generally speaking, is not out on the street, and it is out on the street that we need enforcement for these measures. Traffic wardens are out on the streets. That is fine, so long as people commit offences when the traffic wardens are around, which is mostly during the day. The police might be appointed to undertake this function, as if they have nothing else to do already. Community support officers are an adjunct to the police nowadays and no doubt some reinforcement there would help. However, the point I wish to make is that for fixed penalty notices to have a disincentive effect someone has to see someone commit the offence and book them at the time. That depends on having eyes on the street, the cost of which is unknown.
The Second Reading briefing in another place mentions a Defra figure of £34 million as the additional cost of dealing with abandoned vehicles. ENCAMS reports a figure of an extra £342 million if street litter clearing notices are fully implemented. That depends partly on redefining the dropping of chewing gum as litter. The clearing of chewing gum appears to cost between 50p to £1.50 per square metre of pavement.
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Westminster City Council calculates that it will cost £9 million to clear its streets of chewing gum. If you start to multiply that, by the time you get to a national figure the figure which I have just mentioned is probably very conservative.
The Environment Agency estimates that the cost of dealing with fly-tipping properly will increase by another £100 million to £150 million. It is very difficult to estimate what the cost will be if local authorities take over responsibility for dog control. Perhaps the Minister will deal with the question of resource transfer from the police as the police will no longer have that function or responsibility which they at present enjoy, if that is the correct term. Proper cover has to be provided 24 hours a day. If that additional cost falls on local authorities without adequate resource transfer, council tax bills will come under severe pressure. Increasing council tax is not the most popular thing to do. We need to acknowledge that the Bill, with all its attractions, raises expectations, but that the cost must be recognised if the Bill is to succeed.
I turn to the content of the Bill. I cannot help but observe that the clause concerned with litter clearing notices has an interesting list of exceptions. All the exceptions are dealt with under Section 89 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. However, the real problem that I have with this part of the Bill concerns who will police the Environmental Protection Act. The magistrates' courts can act on a complaint under Section 91 of the Act. There are litter abatement notices in Section 92 and street litter control notices in Section 93.
I suspect that I am not an exception and that we all have our favourite offensive litter dump on a highway or a railway line which we notice as we travel about the countryside, which is patently not being dealt with under the present system. For the life of me I do not see why fixed penalty notices should not be issued in those circumstances to deal with the problem or at least to provide the owner of the site—the exceptions apply to public bodies of one kind or another which have a duty to keep their sites clean—with a reminder that they need to do that.
A fixed penalty notice, which could be issued immediately, would at least be an immediate action on the part of a local authority. That local authority could tell another department of the local authority or another public body, "You are not fulfilling the duty that is laid upon you". Compliance applies across the whole of a commercial business. The compliance department is required to operate behind a Chinese wall so that it cannot be interfered with. It operates with absolute integrity across the business.
My problem with litter clearance notices is that they are not applied widely enough. They ought to apply universally. If a public body—which is otherwise exempt under the Bill in this regard—commits an offence, something ought to be done about it. At the moment in my view the system is patently not working properly.
I have a somewhat different problem with light pollution. We are all familiar with lights all over the countryside. Clause 102(4) contains a list of exceptions in
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that regard. The Minister and I have often argued about putting exceptions in Bills and about lists of exceptions being either too long or too short. I really think that it would be better if there were no exceptions at all. If we are looking for additional exceptions, horticulture is an obvious one, where controlled daylight is essential for the production of some horticultural crops. If you happen to live in the neighbourhood of a town, that can be difficult for the neighbours.
The real problem with lighting is the huge waste of energy and therefore the huge waste of generating capacity and the possibility of the huge waste of carbon dioxide emissions to generate the electricity that is producing the offence. The Bill does nothing to attack that problem.
I am happy to see a roundabout half a mile away from the front of my house in the dark, but I find it ridiculous when I turn around and look out of the back of my house to be able to count the individual traffic lights on a road junction six miles away. The same applies in principle to any industrial site or airport. Modern lighting can be directed at the area that needs to be lit. There is an example of a stretch of road near me that was recently redone. With the lighting on the road itself improved, the amount of lighting that was disappearing elsewhere reduced almost to zero, and you could not see the lights from any distance at all. Light pollution is a different problem; it is an environmental problem on a different scale and of a different nature. The Minister might say that my argument is not appropriate for this Bill, but, if we do not deal with it in this Bill, where do we deal with it? We have the opportunity to deal with it in this Bill.
That is yet another problem, but there are a number of smaller problems with the Bill that I find fascinating. The Environment Agency can issue fixed penalty notices, but it cannot retain the revenue that it gets from them. That is not defined under the Bill, and it should be dealt with. Transport for London is responsible for a remarkably large part of London's road network, but it has no authority to issue fixed penalty notices on the roads for which it is responsible. Why not? It has the responsibility for the roads. That particularly relates to Clauses 3 and 4, which deal with parking "vehicles for sale" and the offence of making repairs to vehicles on the roads.
Clause 50, which deals with the power to require the owners of land to remove waste, appears to be inconsistent with Clause 20, which deals with litter clearing notices. That should be taken care of. Clause 88(4) states that the Commission for Architecture has the power to provide advice,
That fascinates me. Clause 88(8) states that the commission,
Can it make charges for services it provides that have not been asked for? It is not defined in the Bill, and we need to deal with that sort of thing.
This is what I would call a prototype Bill. It is a good Bill, but it could be a better Bill. I hope that we have time to improve it.
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7.44 p.m.
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