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!
