The Tories’ Pick of the Litter

We’re stood outside Old Marston’s library. It’s around 10am; it’s drizzling. We’re being handed a wadge of plastic refuse sacks and several litter picking sticks. This is OxClean.

OxClean is an initiative aimed at cleaning up areas around Oxford. The resident-run campaign focuses on individual responses to keeping Oxford clean, with volunteers organising their own litter-picking days and reporting littering issues like insufficient bin provision and anti-social behaviour. In late February every year, an annual ‘Spring Clean’ is held, where volunteers show up to the old Rec ground in force and form a SWAT team to banish rubbish from all areas surrounding the lengthy Old Marston Road. It’s a wonderful initiative. But why is it only annual?

As trivial as it might sound, littering is a big problem for Britain. The government spends £650million of taxpayers’ money on cleaning city streets around the country; this works out at just under £30 per household. Money is short, and litter prevention is hardly going to top parties’ manifesto pledges. Last week, however, centre-right think tank Bright Blue, as the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) approaches, advised Johnson’s government to increase the fines for littering offences in the UK, since they are classed as a low-impact subcategory of antisocial behaviour. As it stands, British litterers can face a fine of around £50 for dropping an empty packet of Walkers Crisps, or the like, on the ground. In Calgary, the brand would be different, and the price of the action would too - littering fines range from £290-590. Singapore takes the issue even more seriously, with fines starting at the equivalent of £1,140. Wales has actually increased fines already in an attempt to follow these examples, charging £2,500 for litter (such as the prevalent cigarette butts) thrown out of a vehicle window, but officials are admittedly having a difficult time of enforcing such penalties. When societies widely disagree on penalties and don’t comprehend the intrinsic damage done by littering, it is all the more trying to implement such penalties.

The issue is a social one as much as it is economic. The values of public property, respect to members of wider society, and how people value the environment are at play. In 2015 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) produced a report indicating that ‘28% of sites in the most deprived areas fall below an acceptable standard for litter – nine times worse than in the least deprived areas’. The trends of similar reports over the last twenty years have indicated that, in areas where littering, graffiti, tipping, and low levels of cleanup volunteering increased, so did rates of crime. Poverty and social inequality clearly correlate to lower levels of pride in local surroundings, particularly in council-owned boroughs of residency or recreational areas which are publicly rather than privately maintained. ‘Broken Windows Theory’ has studied the way in which petty crimes go on to fuel more serious one, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Rural communities are suffering from littering as well as urban ones. Countryfile has paid deliberate attention to rates of littering in rural areas over the last year, focusing on the severe impact thoughtless littering can have on the lives of animals. We’ve all seen the David Attenborough adverts, with moving footage of turtles and fish strangled or choked by plastic. But the issue doesn’t just occur in tropical oceans and rainforest climates. It is a British emergency too, one affecting wildlife and natural forms unique to the UK, and one which reflects on our values as a country too. Sadly, however, Keep Britain Tidy and Association for Public Service Excellence, in their data collected between 2018 and 2019, show that only 30% of people asked perceived littering as a real problem.

Last week, Brighton and Hove City Council revealed their budget for the year, which included plans to raise at least £40,000 by increasing parking prices and doubling the cost of fines for littering, graffiti, and tipping, among other low-level crimes which damage shared public property. Similar plans were made official by Kingston Council and Preston Council, among others, at the same time. These decisions have all been pushed through by often newly-elected Conservative councillors, which suggest a wider aim from the Party as a whole to increase pride in local communities and in Britain as a whole - perhaps a not unexpected continuation of the patriotic post-Brexit mood. Littering and the way it is tackled is more than a local issue - it is a question of ideology, of understanding voters’ interactions with the locations in which they live, and a desire to see improvement on a minor physical level which might translate into shifts in social attitudes to local communities.

Bright Blue have made vital steps towards changing Britain’s (and its politicians’) attitudes to littering by releasing their recommendations, labelled vaguely humorously as Global Green Giant? A Policy Story. The paper makes an effort to understand why people litter, in order to propose ways in which the Turies might go some way to solving the problem: if it costs £20 to dispose of a broken boiler or defunct freezer at the local tip, then it’s hardly surprising that said boilers and tips start turning up in lay-bys and the back of pub car parks. If people cannot afford to dispose of items sustainably and sensibly, the government must take steps to ensure that they can. Bright Blue recommends removing tip charges for often fly-tipped items, which would theoretically save the government money by reducing the country-wide amount spent on cleaning up after such economically-motivated tipping.

The three other OUCA representatives and I, having spent a morning fishing out cig stubs, Coke cans, and mysterious bits of plastic from Marston’s hedges and verges have ultimately done little to change Britain’s attitude to litter. Oxclean’s initiative is a wholly positive one, and has undoubtedly done good for Marston. But it needs to level up, and become a point of education and ideology as well as one of surface-level tidiness. As we’re tying the necks of the refuse sacks and packing up, I see someone chuck an empty Fanta bottle at a bin, and miss. He doesn’t pick it up.

Annabelle Fuller (President-Elect, Ex-Secretary, Ex-Communications Director, Ex-Senior Committee Member) is a second-year undergraduate reading Classics and English at Magdalen College