Jim Shannon

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. I thank the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) for setting the scene incredibly well. I welcome the Minister, who we are very fortunate to have. She is committed to the very things that we are asking for. I wish her well as she pursues these matters. We are not talking about a minor inconvenience or a bit of harmless litter; we are talking about deliberate, criminal environmental vandalism that directly devalues people’s homes, attracts vermin to their doorsteps and robs law-abiding citizens of their hard-earned money. I am going to give a Northern Ireland perspective, which will not be a big surprise to anybody, but it is important that we put on record where we are. The Northern Ireland environmental statistics report confirms that public anger has reached a boiling point. A staggering 73% of citizens are deeply concerned about our environment. For the first time, air and water pollution has been officially overtaken as the single greatest environmental anxiety for households in Northern Ireland by illegal dumping and littering, which was chosen by some 34% of respondents. When I am at home, I live in Greyabbey. The main town is Newtownards, where my office is. I drive up and down that road two to three times a day—maybe more. People litter their KFCs, their McDonald’s, their sandwiches and their tins. They go out the window and are usually hidden in the grass until the grass is cut. When the grass is cut, guess what? The litter that has been lying there for maybe six months suddenly becomes accessible. The National Trust in Mount Stewart is out, as is the council, trying to do something. We have a beautiful nation. Recent figures show that almost 340 major illegal dumping sites were actively investigated in Northern Ireland in the past year alone. There is an epidemic. My constituency crosses two council areas: Ards and North Down, but I also partially represent Newry, Mourne and Down. They suffer some of the worst littering. They have some 31 major investigated illegal waste sites. That is not counting the mattresses that the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes referred to. People do not take their mattress down to the dump; they throw it into the laybys of the Ards peninsula. They do not count the black bins full of rotting household waste, abandoned in the scenic coastal paths of Bangor or the rural lanes of the Ards peninsula. Every single week, local councils are forced to divert immense resources just to clean up after these waste cowboys. The Northern Ireland Environment Agency has spent some half a million pounds clearing up illegal sites just in the past period.