Hansard

I thank Cameron Buchanan for bringing this important debate to the chamber. I brought a similar debate to the chamber some three years ago.

Litter costs Scotland over £53 million each year. That is money that could be better spent on other services. Litter is a scourge and a blight, it decries any sense of proper national behaviour with regard to rubbish and it affects public health, the environment and landscaping.

Scotland produced its first national litter strategy in June 2014. It is not working. The strategy identified ways to encourage people to take personal responsibility through communication, infrastructure and enforcement. However, they do not, and in my view local authorities certainly do not. For example, at the time of my debate, I proposed that we apply a 10p levy on chewing gum to avoid the chicken pox that destroys our pavements and our streets.

It is a matter of personal responsibility. In the end, we will pay for litter either as taxpayers or as customers of goods and services. There is now an £80 penalty if people are caught littering, which can discourage future offending. However, the mess that lies in the streets today but that could be recycled amounts to something like £1.2 million, which would generate income for the relevant authorities. We can influence behaviour when we work together; I commend Glasgow City Council for its “time or fine” initiative, whereby people who cannot afford to pay the fine spend time picking up the litter that has been created.

When we look at our attitude to recycling now compared to our attitude 10 to 15 years ago, we see that there has been a societal change. There is still lots to do, but awareness is much greater. We need to ensure that we promote social change in relation to littering and fly-tipping to the same degree, and we can do that in a number of ways. We could make better use of materials that may end up as litter or being fly-tipped, and the whole packaging industry needs to consider biodegradability in packaging much more than it does now.

Ensuring that our communities are cleaner and safer is essential where we live and do business. Ultimately, that will lead to a reduction in the damaging consequences of litter and fly-tipping to our wellbeing and to our environment. Information is key in delivering our goals. We need to explain to people what the right thing to do with waste is. As Cameron Buchanan said, that starts in schools: we need to educate.

Along with education, there is also now a need to ensure that we have proper infrastructure. We must work with business and designers to ensure that their products can be recycled in the first place, and we need to ensure that there are incentives and support in place to support activity that delivers litter-free environments.

Meaningful enforcement needs to sit alongside that, though; we need effective laws and procedures that deter littering in the first place. To deliver the strategy, we need to involve businesses, the resource management industry, the Scottish Government, local authorities and the third sector, including environmental charities and local community groups. Local authorities and business improvement districts are encouraged to apply for funding and, where that has been implemented, it has resulted in an average drop in littering of 38 per cent. I encourage our local authorities to do much more specifically to create social enterprises or community enterprises to take over management of cleaning up litter.

If Scotland is to be attractive to tourists and if we are to ensure that Scotland is the beautiful country that we know it to be, Government, local authorities, businesses and schools must work together to push for the change in culture and behaviour that is very much needed.