Jas Athwal

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) for securing this incredibly important debate. I pay tribute to the South Park Users Group in Ilford South. Come rain or shine, they dedicate their time to keep our parks and streets clean through regular community litter picks. I also put on record my appreciation for the River Roding Trust, whose members collectively cleaned up 200 bags of rubbish from the River Roding, picking up the slack when Thames Water and the Environment Agency should have acted. I commend them for their dedication to ensuring that the residents of Ilford South live in a cleaner and safer environment. Fly-tipping is a scourge that repeatedly comes up in conversations with residents. Recently, I visited a local school where children as young as 10 interrogated me about the fly-tipping that blights our area. The fly-tippers may think that they are invisible and that they can dump their waste and get away with it, but fly-tipping is one of the most visible crimes in our communities. When people see it on their way to work, on the school run or while walking their dog, it drains local pride, chips away at social trust and sends a message that our streets, parks and rivers do not matter.