Hansard

I thank Graeme Dey for bringing the debate to the chamber. He may be surprised to hear that I will speak about the situation in Paisley.

A fresh attitude to the problem of rubbish can make a difference. Vandalism is one of Paisley’s problems, which is evident in graffiti writing and antisocial behaviour in some areas. I know a community activist—I will not mention his name—who is an elderly gentleman living in the south end of Paisley. At every meeting that he attends—the community council meeting, the tenants and residents association meeting, or the local area committee—he asks what they will do about the Neilston Road shops, which are covered in graffiti.

That leads us into an interesting debate about how we might keep a whole area clean and tidy—which, as Graeme Dey has pointed out, is not just the responsibility of the local authority or the kids who pick up rubbish after school. Everyone has to be involved, including local businesses. For too long now, many retailers and those running businesses in the streets of our towns and cities, who take money from our pockets, seem to forget that, although they might not live in the town that they serve, they actually gain from being part of the community and should work along with it to ensure that the town is clean. After all, such an approach could make a massive difference in many different areas. Not only is rubbish in our town centres unsightly and wrong, but who will invest in a town centre that has rubbish all over its streets? No one will spend thousands of pounds on setting up a new business if there is rubbish everywhere, bin bags lying uncollected and so on. These things make a difference.

We have all seen pictures of housing estates throughout the country that show how lovely the estates were in the 1950s and 1960s. If those in certain areas or streets simply allow rubbish to go everywhere, everyone simply gives up and leaves it lying. As a result, such behaviour becomes the norm. Graeme Dey does us a favour by highlighting this issue and reminding us that this is not just about some on-going campaign but something that should always be part of our lives.

When the Scottish National Party was the administration in Renfrewshire, it introduced the clean Renfrewshire campaign; although we offered community clean-ups, we focused on the ownership of the idea and on getting people to realise that it was our problem and that we had to deal with it. I think that that is the most important issue. We also gave the warden service the powers to book people for littering and the like in the town; the move was not very popular initially, but it made a difference in the area and helped to change the culture. As Graeme Dey pointed out, we have to make it clear that fly-tipping is totally unacceptable. Once it happens in one area, it quickly starts to happen non-stop.

I thank Graeme Dey for securing the debate. We have to work together on this issue; indeed, the message of the local campaigns in which I was involved was that every one of us was responsible and that we needed to clean Renfrewshire together. That made all the difference.

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