I thank my right hon. Friend for raising that point. Most weeks, I drive up the A1 and M1 to my North West Durham constituency, so I know exactly the issues he is raising. I will write to him about the specific issues around the roads in his constituency.
I want to go into a few more details, but we all want the issue to be addressed. Obviously, safety is paramount when clearing litter from the network. The roads are often fast running a lot of the time, with high volumes of traffic. Litter picking usually requires traffic management and sometimes overnight working as well. Relevant organisations across Government work closely with other litter clearing organisations to improve the operational effectiveness of clearing wherever possible.
National Highways has previously utilised the Ministry of Justice’s community payback project scheme to assist with those clearances. Offenders have been involved in removing graffiti and rubbish at service stations as well. As my right hon. Friend will know, the Government still own a significant number of service stations on the national highway network. The scheme was suspended during the covid pandemic; I undertake to write to him about that and about what we are doing to push National
Highways to make more use of it going forwards. Due to safety considerations, the opportunities for using offenders can be limited.
More broadly, the simple fact is that if litter was not dropped in the first place it would not need to be picked up; that is why influencing behaviours is an essential component of tackling the issue. My hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent South and for Dartford made that point as well. To answer one of the questions posed by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough, I had a meeting with the chief executive of National Highways today and raised the issue of littering. In fairness to my officials, I have meetings every couple of weeks with the National Highways chief exec, and this was one issue that was raised today.
I have also spoken with National Highways about a broader awareness campaign. I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford who made the important point that there is aggressive littering and more passive littering, and it is particularly important that we do all we can to make people aware of the impact littering has on not only the environment but everyone’s enjoyment of travelling across the country and our rural environment. There is a campaign currently in the offing to tackle this, because National Highways is aware of how much of an issue it has become.
National Highways uses research and evidence to inform anti-littering interventions, such as car and lorry-height bins, which people may have seen as they leave motorway service stations; anti-littering posters; and signs to encourage positive littering behaviours. I will write to hon. Members who have attended today’s debate about what more National Highways is doing in that space. Campaigns and messages such as “Don’t Drop Litter, Bin It” and “Keep It, Bin It” have been shown on electric message boards across the National Highways network, and there have been digital display sites at traffic hubs and motorway service stations across England. Feedback from road users has shown that that type of messaging can make a difference in reducing the amount of littering on certain parts of the network, and I want National Highways to do more of it.
We are continuously looking for other ways to influence littering behaviour, and we work with anti-littering charities, such as Keep Britain Tidy, and use their research to develop other interventions. National Highways supports the annual Great British Spring Clean, which raises awareness of roadside litter and encourages people to dispose of their litter correctly or to take it home. This year’s campaign was the seventh year that National Highways has been involved, and over the previous six campaigns it has collected over 60,000 binbags full of litter across the road network. National Highways also engages the commercial transport sector via its recently established professional driver experience panel, and littering behaviour campaigns throughout 2022 were aimed at road user groups who admit to having a propensity to litter, which includes commercial vehicle drivers.
Road users are also encouraged to report any instances of littering on the network to National Highways. There is also guidance available on many local authority websites, as well as other applications, to assist members of the public in reporting litter. All those interventions work towards engaging the public and preventing littering on
the network in the first place, but this is a societal issue that does not just affect the wider road network. It will take work across wider Government and anti-littering organisations to continue to drive change in how littering affects areas.