Motor Vehicles: Litter

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs written question – answered at on 16 July 2019.

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Photo of Greg Knight Greg Knight Conservative, East Yorkshire

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will monitor the number of (a) prosecutions and (b) fixed penalty notices for dropping litter from a vehicle in England and Wales annually, what plans he has to help reduce the incidence of such offences; and if he will make a statement.

Photo of Therese Coffey Therese Coffey The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The Government does not collect or monitor any data on the number of prosecutions or fixed penalty notices for littering from vehicles and has no plans to do so. The Government has given powers to local authorities that they requested and it is now for them to use.

On 30 November last year we launched our new campaign, “Keep it, Bin it”, with support from the environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. The campaign imagery is being displayed in all seven Extra Motorway Service Areas (MSA) across England.

This year saw the fourth year that Highways England has supported Keep Britain Tidy’s Great British Spring Clean; 19,450 bags of litter were collected in this year’s spring clean, more than doubling last year’s collection of 8,000 bags.

We continue to work with Highways England to investigate new ways of reducing littering on our major roads. This includes introducing behavioural interventions such as trialling car and lorry-height funnel bins at the Roadchef MSA in Maidstone on 21 June last year, along the M20, to test whether they reduce littering. The number of bags of litter collected on the on-slips reduced by 47.1%.

The first round of the Litter Innovation Fund awarded grants to two projects trialling interventions to tackle roadside litter. The results will be published shortly.

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