More children face £50 fines for littering despite civil liberty outcry

Teams of wardens will patrol near secondary schools in South Lanarkshire and issue fixed penalties to offending pupils.

The move to extend fines among under-16s follows a six-month pilot project which was credited with cleaning up 21 litter “hotspots”.

During the pilot scheme, wardens issued 168 warnings to children, although no fines were handed out because the pupils agreed to pick up what they dropped. Residents and business owners said they would like to see the scheme become permanent.

The local authority says tackling litter costs £5 million a year and hopes that the threat of fines will reduce this.

South Lanarkshire Council is the second local authority in Scotland to introduce litter fines for under-16s. Glasgow City Council announced it would issue fines to youngsters three years ago as part of a £5m initiative to clean up the city.

A spokesman for Glasgow council said the policy had been a successful way of reducing litter outside schools: “We first issued fixed-penalty notices to young people as part of the Clean Glasgow campaign in February 2008. It had an immediate impact – with offences observed outside schools rapidly falling from 23 per week to just three.

“We also encourage young people to pay off their penalties by taking part in community clean-up events, rather than paying cash, as we feel it is important that they, rather than their parents, take responsibility.”

However, the move has been strongly criticised by civil rights campaigners. Nick Pickles, director of civil liberties and privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “On-the-spot fines are a notoriously unreliable means of enforcement when not issued by the police.

“They bypass due process and have led to numerous instances of law-abiding people being targeted as part of what all too often seems to be a revenue-raising exercise.

“Targeting them at young people is a recipe for over-zealous enforcement to further undermine trust in officials and will do little to address the root causes of the problem, not to mention a worrying step to further criminalise children.”

Margaret Mitchell, MSP, the Scottish Conservative leadership candidate, said: “The idea behind this is quite good, but I wonder just how easy it will be to enforce and who will end up paying this at the end of the day.

“I would have thought it would be more effective to get the children to do a couple of hours’ clearing up around the area where they have dropped litter. That way they would be making a more positive contribution to the local environment.”

Under the new scheme in South Lanarkshire, which was approved by councillors yesterday, wardens will not be allowed to enter playgrounds to issue the fines and can only patrol outside school premises.

A council spokeswoman said: “Fixed-penalty notices for littering will now to be extended on a permanent basis to include under-16-year-olds.

“Until recently, young people under the age of 16 years had been excluded from fines for littering, as it was felt that the council’s intensive programme of awareness-raising campaigns to combat littering was the best way forward.”