‘We’re just back from our annual holiday in’ (choose any European country you like!) ‘and were so impressed as usual with the lack of litter in their towns. Why can’t our Councils do the same?’ is a common theme running through readers’ letters to our national newspapers most summers.
Actually there are a number of reasons for the disgraceful state of litter in Scotland (and the rest of the UK), but fundamentally it’s a combination of public attitudes: (‘we don’t really care’ and/or ‘because we get away with it.’)
Soon after I started training, one of my early jobs was to devise daily routes for the first mechanical street sweeper the Council had ever bought. The Burgh Surveyor laid out the brief for covering our 25 miles of unclassified roads each week as:
Daily – the bus routes; school entrances (after lunchtime, during term); and the shop units in the housing schemes.
Weekly – following the daily refuse collection routes for our two RCVs and covering the remaining streets.
Cul-de-sacs were to be swept manually and the town centre was left to a dedicated manual operative.
So arguably, we were accepting the fact that people were dropping litter and our service was mostly reactive.
There was legislation to control the problem (The Litter Act 1958) but it was enforced by the Police and required the Police Officer to ask the individual to pick up their litter: if they did, then that was the end of the matter. In the west of Scotland it was often common that the miscreant (perhaps inebriated?) would tell the Officer to ‘**** off’, and then be arrested and charged with Breach of the Peace, so data on the effectiveness of the legislation was patchy
The Scottish ‘branch’ of ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ was rebranded as ‘Keep Scotland Beautiful’ (KSB) around the end of the 1970s and began to get good publicity with the appointment of a new Director, Douglas Wright (a former soldier who said he didn’t possess a pair of trousers and always wore the kilt) and his wife May as the Office Manager. Douglas got stuck into Councils at every opportunity when he felt they weren’t doing enough to deal with litter and was the instigator of the original ‘National Spring Clean event’ in Scotland where Councils were invited to encourage local volunteer groups to clean up local areas that might not fall within their responsibilities (eg waste ground, woodland etc), the logic being that if local people tidied up these areas, they to stay clean for much longer. When Douglas was asked why there were no litter issues in Singapore, he’d explain that they’d had a problem with illegal migration and had introduced ID cards for all citizens entitled to live in the country. Their police however didn’t have the power to stop individuals at random and ask for their ID: the person had to have been seen allegedly committing an offence. Dropping litter was one of the easiest reasons for doing an ID check so most people stopped dropping litter to avoid being stopped. If the UK ever decides to introduce mandatory ID cards, then this option might help! Today KSB is a registered charity and employs around 50 staff. The original initiative has now grown into ‘SpringCleanScotland’ and runs for several weeks, but is still mainly dependant on volunteers.
After the 1975 reorganisation of Local Government in Scotland all the new Councils appointed Directors of Cleansing or Directors of Environmental Health and Cleansing. All (apart from one) had appropriate qualifications but the situation became complicated after the Thatcher Government introduced legislation for Compulsory Competitive Tendering in the second half of the 1980s. Councils would no longer be able to deliver some services (including parks maintenance, vehicle maintenance, refuse collection and street sweeping) exclusively, but were to prepare detailed specifications and invite tenders from the private sector. They could only retain these services ‘in-house’ if they then submitted the lowest tender. In Scotland, all the tenders for street sweeping were won in-house but some Councils had prepared tortuous specifications (an attempt to deter private sector bids) and after having won the contract, were unable to comply with their new obligations. However, the problem was alleviated to some extent as contract performance was monitored by a ‘Client Service’ (sometimes within the same Department!) It was about this time that the concept of the ‘litter-pick’ emerged: squads picking up visible litter rather than traditional manual or mechanical sweeping
After the enactment of the Environment Protection Act 1990, the Code of Practice on Litter and Refuse (COPLAR) was devised: an innovative approach where all 53 Scottish District Councils and the 3 Islands Councils were required to ‘zone’ every public area that they had a duty to keep clean. Four standards of cleanliness were defined and response times set out where any zone that fell below its prescribed standard had to be rectified within certain timescales: the best example being that if a town centre (Zone 1) was grossly littered, the Council only had an hour to get it back to ‘no visible litter or refuse.’ Councils were to make their zoning available for public inspection, and the public could petition the Sheriff if they felt their Council wasn’t complying with the Code.
On paper it was a significant advance but unfortunately little if any thought was given to alerting the public about it. The zonal areas were passed on to the new 32 Unitary Councils formed in 1996 but many of them no longer had dedicated Directors of Cleansing or Directors of Environmental Health and Cleansing as the tendency was to have a small number of multi-disciplinary services.
The 1990 Act also provided for Officers authorised by the Council to issue Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) to anybody seen dropping litter or failing to clean up after their dog(s). Again it looked good on paper but in practice, it failed to take account of the fact that in the UK, there’s no need for anybody to prove who they are (unless questioned by a police officer) so unless the miscreant gave an obviously bogus name and address (eg ‘Michael Mouse, c/o Disneyland Paris’), the Council Officer had no way of verifying the information offered. In some cases, if the litterer or the dog owner responded aggressively on being challenged about the alleged offence, the Council Officer would often simply walk away citing the Health & Safety Legislation (‘I feared for my personal safety’ etc) as an excuse.
By this time, most Councils and Keep Scotland Beautiful were working closely to deliver litter behaviour courses in the schools with some excellent results in Primary schools but unfortunately the habit wasn’t continued when the pupils went up to Secondary school. Some informal research by Inverness District Council’s Litter warden in 1995 suggested that despite it being difficult to walk more than a dozen paces without passing a litter bin, the main sources of litter in the High Street were:
- Teenagers (primarily boys);
- ATMs;
- Toddlers in pushchairs;
- Adults.
Around the turn of the century, KSB announced the introduction of their Local Environmental Audit and Management system (LEAMS) where they’d carry out an annual audit of all the Unitary Authorities and award them ‘scores’ on their street cleansing performances. Within a very short time, most (if not all) of the Councils’ Cleansing Officers had worked out how to get very high %age results, as few (if any) of the KSB monitoring staff had any experience of delivering street cleansing services. Things came to a head around 2020 when a Glasgow Councillor asked why the Authority was being awarded >95% for LEAMS when the City Centre was so filthy? Despite a number of calls from interested observers, KSB still declines to use COPLAR as a more effective measurement tool
Although it was recognised that the enforcement powers open to Councils for controlling litter were somewhat limited, East Ayrshire Council’s Cleansing Service developed a new initiative around 2022 to address the problem of the amount of litter left outside secondary school gates after lunchtime, as it was taking crews around 45 minutes to clean up. A Memo was sent to the Council’s Head of Schools advising that all Head Teachers in Secondary Schools should alert their pupils that litter patrols would be starting in the next fortnight and anyone seen dropping litter would be given a Fixed Penalty Notice. After ten days, four simultaneous patrols were arranged: a Council Officer authorised to issue FPNs and a Community Police Office wearing their overcoat that covered their uniform. On seeing a pupil drop litter, the patrol approached the miscreant, the Police Officer identified themselves and asked for the pupil’s name (where appropriate the Police Officer explained it was an Offence to give a false name) and their class. They were also advised that a FPN would be issued to them later on in the day. After the lunch break, the patrols went into the school, met the Head Teacher and asked that the pupils concerned be called along (with a Guidance Teacher if appropriate). The pupil was then asked for their full name and address and the FPN issued. The Police Officer also advised that the local Sub-Commander would be writing to their parents/guardians. All in all, eight FPNs were issued and the writer debriefed the Council Officers when they came back to the office.
By four o’clock the Head of Schools had phoned me to ask what authority I had to carry out this project, and why he hadn’t been told about it? I referred to our earlier memo (that he claimed he’d never seen) and that at least one of the Head Teachers present when the FPN was issued had reminded the pupil that he’d read out the warning letter at Assembly the week before. By noon the following day, we’d had mixed feedback. One Mother (living in an area considered to be ‘deprived’) phoned to apologise, saying she’d grounded her son and stopped his allowance until the FPN was paid off. One Father phoned me in a temper saying we’d destroyed ‘years of warning our children not to talk to strangers’; and other phoned to say he’d be appealing the FPN as ‘my son definitely didn’t throw away his half-eaten sandwich’ and we have witnesses.’ He slammed the phone down when I agreed with him, pointing out that his son had actually grabbed the sandwich from another pupil’s grasp, then thrown it down. But the benefits for the Cleansing Service were significant as it was now taking under 10 minutes to clean up at the school gates, and helped immensely by our PR colleagues who had an appropriate article published in the local newspapers. I formed the view that these patrols weren’t unlike police speed traps where after a few speeders are caught, word gets round and nobody speeds. And if that analogy is translated to litter patrols and everybody stops dropping litter, it’s great for the environment.
But for some reason, few if any of the players in the anti-litter game were all that interested in our success and we’re back to a focus on ‘litter and fly-tipping’ (that are actually two entirely different problems and need totally separate solutions) with the emphasis being on ‘increased fines’ etc: that ignores the fact that firstly in the UK the offender’s ability to pay has to be considered before the magnitude of the fine is decided and secondly, that unless offenders are caught by the enforcement agencies, the size of the potential fine to be levied is meaningless.
So until something changes, we’ll just have to accept that our litter problem is endemic and with Council budgets being faced with conflicting requests for funding, it’s likely nothing will change. It’s not helped by the fact that in many of our Councils nowadays, the most senior properly qualified Cleansing Manager might be no higher than in a third or fourth tier post in a very large Department and the chances of his/her voice being heard by the Director or Senior Councillors are remote.
Written by John Crawford, Life Member CIWM