It’s the first weekend of the new year, and I should like to take a government minister out for a walk. The one I have in mind is the dynamically named Rebecca Pow.
She is the new (anti) Litter Minister. What little I know of her suggests she cares about rural issues. She comes from Somerset. She went to agricultural college. She’s written a book about gardens.
I hope she lives up to her monosyllable. Because she follows in a long and exceptionally feeble procession of failures.
In the past 10 years there have been no fewer than nine litter ministers. No wonder the country’s a tip: no one has been there long enough to do anything. If the nonentities before her had achieved anything, they’d have worked themselves out of a job.
Instead of which, we continue to live surrounded by trash. It’s all reminiscent of that stunt Mrs Thatcher tried to pull in the Eighties when she arranged to be filmed picking up litter in St James’s Park. It had all been dropped there a few minutes beforehand by flunkeys, so Mrs T would have something to do.
The wing of government for which the mighty (we hope) Ms Pow works, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) did not exist then, but perhaps some cursed civil servant there was among the team of litter-scatterers. If so, he or she needs to be told to stop. The stunt is over.
Defra’s predecessor, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, was widely known as the most useless department in Whitehall. Defra (the very name is a dustbin for unwanted duties) has inherited its forerunner’s reputation nobly.
So Ms Pow and I should start our walk in town where the streets are strewn with dead Christmas trees and plastic bags in which people have dumped their unwanted seasonal wrapping paper.
Then we might go for a drive along the roads from which the morons of this country throw the plastic bottles, coffee cups and fast-food wrappers that they’ve decided they don’t want in their car with them. I’d be interested to know what she thinks about the fact that of 139 councils surveyed by Clean Up Britain recently, 94 issued only one fine (or less) for littering per week. There are reckoned to be about 700,000 plastic bottles thrown away every single day.
We should end up in a well-known beauty spot. Or, as it is known to local fly-tippers, “the dump”.
There is no shortage of these places across the country. Unsurprisingly, your local cowboy builder prefers to chuck the skirting boards, old loos, and broken winders he’s torn out of your house on a cash-in-hand job, instead of paying the charge which would be levied at the local dump.
What will Ms Pow think of the fact that the Environment Agency managed to prosecute one solitary fly-tipper in the whole of last year? I shall suggest to her that instead of spending millions cleaning up after fly-tippers, the Government stops incentivising them to dump their rubbish by making it free to use waste disposal centres, and funds local councils properly so they can provide this service.
Politicians know that people are sick of litter. So I hope Ms Pow wastes no energy trying to get Defra to jettison that functionally useless organisation, Keep Britain Tidy. Almost three years ago her department set out a 36-point plan to clean up the country. It was larded with guff about “best practice” and a “world class” strategy. The department proudly reported last autumn that a whole four targets – including deciding how to measure litter – had been completed. We need some energy, Ms Pow.
I have just returned from India, which is utterly filthy. No one would suggest that the litter problem in Britain is as bad. Ms Pow sponsored a photographic competition to promote something called “Somerset Day”. I think I should invite her to take a picture from which you couldn’t tell whether it was England or India. There’s no shortage of potential sites.
The lesson of India is that there are far too many people and far too little sense of shared space. Litter is what happens when someone decides they don’t need a thing any longer and doesn’t recognise that by making it everyone’s problem you don’t stop it being yours, too. They understand that in the United States: the maximum penalty for littering in California is a $1,000 (£765) fine.
In the end, of course, the only way to get rid of the problem is not to create it. We can’t blame government for the fact that it exists. But we can look to them to take it seriously.
Ms Pow, we’ve got our eyes on you.
Jeremy Paxman is Patron of Clean Up Britain; cleanupbritain.org
Britain is rubbish at rubbish. Here are my tidying tips for our new litter tsar