Julian Knight – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Julian Knight on 2016-06-03.
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what funding her Department provides for (a) litter awareness campaigns, (b) implementation of the National Litter Strategy and (c) litter clearance at sites of national and cultural significance.
Rory Stewart
Defra supported the Clean for the Queen campaign, run earlier this year on behalf of Country Life by Keep Britain Tidy, with a grant of £9,500 towards providing resource packs to help support and encourage schools to participate in the campaign and to support monitoring and evaluation of the impacts and effectiveness of the campaign. The Department for Communities and Local Government also spent £5,000 on promoting the initiative through Facebook.
Defra also provides £5,000 per year to the Marine Conservation Society to carry out beach cleaning at priority beaches.
It is up to local councils to determine their own spending priorities, including for litter clearance at local sites of national or cultural significance, and central Government does not provide any specific funding to them for this purpose. Where such sites are on private land, it is for the landowner to make arrangements for litter clearance.
Where possible, we aim to ensure that the costs of dealing with litter issues are passed to those responsible for causing the problem. We will look to implement measures in the forthcoming Litter Strategy for England through working in partnership with business and campaigning organisations.
