My Lords, one step at a time. I am going to let my noble friend’s suggested change to the amendment pass by for the time being. However, I have a great deal of sympathy for both these amendments. I will concentrate on my noble friend Lord Marlesford’s amendment. I have now moved from my home in a national park, but I have always been horrified by the casual way that, in one of the
most beautiful valleys in the countryside, people throw drink containers out of the windows of their cars as if that was a normal and natural thing to do. I am almost equally horrified—frustrated, indeed—by the attitude described by my noble friend as coming from Defra. I am not entirely surprised that it comes from officials: I am horrified that it has come in the form of letters from my noble friends who I have always regarded as thoroughly practical, sensible and wise people. I hope that my noble friend Lord Taylor will show that I am right in that respect when he responds to this debate.
The condition of our roadsides is really appalling. It is a very long time since I served in Lady Thatcher’s Government, but I well remember her returning from an overseas trip and expressing horror and consternation at the state of the road from Heathrow to London given the litter that was there, compared to the roadsides she had observed in the places she had been visiting. This was, I am afraid, one of the occasions when she did not do anything and here we are, 30 or more years later, and nothing effective has been done.
My noble friend described the comments from a Minister about the strength of the legal system and how, if you have a tough law and all the awful penalties he described, people were likely to take notice of it. I have to tell him that it is not only the hooligans and the ignorant who ignore the law. I well remember, when I was still a Member of Parliament for Pembroke, the president of my association—who had himself fought three parliamentary elections and was a distinguished local magistrate—telling me of driving back over the Preseli Hills from a magistrates’ meeting in Haverfordwest. He was horrified because someone in the car in front of him was throwing papers out of the window every few hundred yards. After he had driven for 10 or 20 miles and the confetti had been scattered along the roadside for a considerable distance, he decided to stop to see what the litter consisted of. He stopped, picked up the litter and discovered that it was the minutes of the magistrates’ meeting that he had just left. There you had a magistrate leaving a magistrate’s meeting who was so terrified of the law which my noble friend has described that he was taking no notice of it at all.
We have a very practical suggestion from my noble friend and it does not deserve the casual and rather absurd way that it has been treated so far by Defra. I hope that the Minister, if he cannot accept the amendment in exactly its present form, will tell the House that he will be prepared to discuss this whole matter in much more detail with his department in the hope that we can make some belated progress on this urgent problem.