Wednesday 24 April 2019

Newspaper column 24 April 2019 - Progress on balloon and sky lantern changes


It has been good to be at home in Cornwall for the last week, meeting with local businesses and people and catching up with friends and family. I hope you were able to have some time to relax over the Easter Weekend enjoying the wonderful  weather.

It was good to see so many tourists around and hear reports from all sorts of businesses that they were busy. Hopefully this bodes well for another successful season for our vital local tourist industry.

It is times such as this weekend that remind us how lucky we are to live in a place with such amazing beaches and coastline that draw thousands of people to visit. The value of our beaches to our local economy cannot be over stated.

Both in my role as Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Ocean Conservation and as the local MP, I have always taken seriously the importance of preserving our natural assets – regularly participating in beach cleans and working to change national policy.

Last year I was contacted by the Mid-Cornwall representative for Keep Britain Tidy who raised with me a particular issue that is one of the causes of the litter that pollutes our sea and beaches - that of balloon and sky lantern releases.

Currently under the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) 1990, which covers littering with fines of up to £2,500 for offences, releasing balloons and sky lanterns are not covered. Under this act it is an offence to drop “or otherwise deposit” litter in a public place. However releasing balloons and sky lanterns is not viewed as an offence under this Act.

In my view however, releasing balloons and lanterns is no different to littering. You are just throwing rubbish up instead of down, and we all know that what goes up must come down. We are particularly aware of this in a place such as Cornwall as so much of these items end up in the sea and on our coasts.

Earlier this year I attended the Plastic Free Cornwall Summit and heard from the many voluntary groups that are already doing so much in Cornwall about what a menace balloons and sky lanterns are to our wildlife and environment.

On Love Your Beach Day in February I raised this matter in Parliament, calling upon the government to consider reclassifying balloon releases as littering.

The legislation around this was last reviewed in 2013. There is much more awareness now of pollution caused by balloons and lanterns and amending the policy in this way is a sensible and achievable step to take.

With the growing national and global cultural awareness of littering and going ‘plastic free’, there is now the public will in place and the means to bring this in. As a result I recently requested a meeting with Michael Gove as the Secretary of State for the Environment to discuss this.

I was able to meet with him just before Parliament rose for the Easter recess and I was pleased that the Secretary of State agreed with me and as a result has now agreed to look at reviewing this issue and the legislation that covers it. I would like to thank all of the volunteer groups involved, both for their tireless work cleaning our beaches and also in bringing such an important and relevant issue to my attention.

I will await the outcome of the Secretary of State’s review with interest and will continue to work with all parties on environmental matters like this, which transcend party politics - something we can all agree on!