Together with Keep Britain Tidy, I was pleased to help launch this year’s Great British Spring Clean. Litter makes us all unhappy. It spoils our streets, it wrecks out parks and it damages our natural environment.
Keep Britain Tidy’s ninth Great British Spring Clean runs from 15-31 March this year, bringing together individuals, community organisations, schools, businesses and councils in Worthing and Arun to make a difference to the environment on our doorstep.
In the coming days, I will be out and about in Worthing with local Councillors and Community Champions to crack on with the biggest litter pick in the calendar.
I share with children at every school I visit that if we all picked up one bit of litter off the street, held onto our own rubbish, and put the lid on any bins we might see with rubbish blowing out, our open spaces and natural environment would be cleaner and healthier.
Residents may also be interested in the wider work I am pleased to be undertaking to tackle the scourge of litter.
I have nominated the A27 to be prioritised for an organised litter pick as part of the Community Payback scheme after recognising, along with many constituents, a building up of litter along the road that is too dangerous for regular community volunteers to tackle.
Unpaid Work is a Community Sentence, known as Community Payback, which allows for convicted offenders to pay back to the communities they have offended in and is one of the robust alternatives to short term custodial sentences available to courts to help reduce reoffending.
In the UK it is estimated that five million tonnes of plastic is used every year, nearly half of which is packaging.
In October 2023, the UK Government implemented restrictions on a range of single-use plastics, and certain types of polystyrene products. This new ban is the necessary next step in cracking down on harmful plastic waste. I was pleased to be a supporter of this.
However, only 10 per cent of the 2.7 billion items of single-use cutlery used per year gets recycled, there is more that could and should be done to combat plastic pollution.
Reducing the amount of plastic we throw away is an individual action we can all take to help transform our country for the better. Many of us already do our part to keep our local communities and environment clean, and of that, we can be proud.
I continue to do all I can, inside Parliament and out, for common sense solutions to increase recycling and reduce littering.
