 Yr eiswyddiant ar hyn yn committee immediately ac yn ei dd Idiadog atswrstream ac yn deu gym Can I begin by sincerely thanking all of the colleagues who signed the motion, allowing me to hold this important member's debate this evening? Can I also warmly thank those who are either in the chamber this evening to take part in the debate or are here to simply listen to proceedings? Signed officer, the reason I wanted to lead this debate this evening is because, like many others in this chamber and outwith, I care passionately and have a deep pride in our country. I despair when I see our land tarnished by those who litter, spit their chewing gum on the street, allowed dogfowling or fly tipping, whether that's through carelessness or illegal behaviour. As the brief income keeps Scotland beautiful sent to all MSPs tells us, the statistics on those matters are alarming. 250 million easily visible items of litter are dropped in Scotland every year. Every day, Scottish smokers throw away 2 million cigarette butts. There are 170 incidents of fly tipping every day, 80 per cent of gums not put in the bin, and that costs about £18 per square foot to remove. Goodness knows how many incidents of dogfowling. It's because of statistics like those. What we can see from the evidence of our own eyes is that we should so enthusiastically support Keep Scotland Beautiful's Clean Up Scotland campaign. It is a fantastic mass engagement campaign that is working hard to make Scotland the cleanest country in Europe. Who could not sign up enthusiastically to such a vision? I know that, across the chamber, we all agree that Scotland is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. We have a rich mix of incredible, rural beauty, world-class cities and vibrant urban developments. In order to protect and enhance our country's natural advantages, it is vital to support campaigns like this. The Clean Up Scotland campaign works across all 32 local authorities and has at its heart the aim to try and change people's attitudes and their long-term behaviour towards litter. All of Scotland's 32 local authorities, as you might expect, have thrown their weight behind the campaign, as have organisations such as Visit Scotland, Historic Scotland, BT, Scottish Water, SSE and the Scottish Government, who are also supporters of the campaign. The campaign also has substantial business support, building up an impressive coalition of the willing, motivating more than 80 local, national and global brands to invest in the campaign messages. Those include McDonald's, who have signed the Clean Up Scotland pledge supported by all stores and 13 franchisees who organised cleanups, Bid Scotland, Greggs and Coca-Cola. The Clean Up Scotland campaign is leading community clean-up activities across the country to tackle carelessness and illegal behaviour of those individuals who damage our quality of life and tarnish the country's image. The campaign has seen 500,000 voluntary clean-up actions, picking up 5,000 tonnes of litter. That is two quite impressive sets of statistics for different reasons, obviously. Keep Scotland Beautiful rightly wants to change long-term behaviour by making dropping litter as socially unacceptable as drink driving is today. Of course, the problem is not simply just the visual one. There are social health and financial consequences, as well as environmental considerations. The current cost of dealing with the problem of litter in Scotland alone is more than £1 million per week. Social health is a proven link between environmental disabilities and the fear of crime. People feel safer in cleaner communities. Our health is also affected by higher levels of depression, illness and medical interventions among people who live in areas that are not clean. Finally, there are severe financial consequences, too, for the householder directly in their pocket, their council tax. A big chunk of that has to go and be spent on issues such as this, and landowners spending significant sums of money clearing mess from their own land. Those of you who know me well know that tourism is something that I care passionately about. It is an industry that is worth more than £4 billion a year to Scotland. Scenery and landscapes is one of the top reasons that people give for visiting Scotland. First impressions are that people have. When they visit our country, they are hugely important. People visiting Scotland do not want to see streets full of litter, walls covered in unsightly graffiti or flag-tipping along the side of our country roads. Cleaning up Scotland is helping to make sure that our villages, towns and cities are kept as clean as possible so that people can enjoy what Scotland has to offer without having to worry about an unclean environment around them. One of the ways that Cleaning up Scotland goes about that is through the Hero of a Month award, which recognises a volunteer's outstanding contribution to cleaning up Scotland. In my own constituency of Stirling, Donald Holmes won the award in December 2014. Donald was an awarded hero of the month for his outstanding individual efforts to collect and recycle litter around the village of Baclywy. Stilling Council nominated Donald, who is to date corrected around 90 bags of rubbish and is now starting to recycle the collected waste. People like Donald are inspirational. His work will hopefully encourage others to work in the same quiet, efficient manner and make a difference to the local and therefore national environment. Members like Donald keep Scotland beautiful and all those involved with Cleaning up Scotland do a job that often goes unnoticed. The most recent initiative from Cleaning up Scotland in 2015 will be the 2-minute cleanup, which will campaign under the hashtag 2-minute cleanup for all us Twitter users. The campaign aims to encourage those who may not have time to participate properly in a longer cleanup. Instead, Cleaning up Scotland is providing people with bespoke recycling bags that they can easily use to collect litter for two minutes a day. When we see litter on the streets, we rightly complain about it. However, when we don't and instead we see clean streets, we usually think nothing of it. That is due to the hard work of organisations such as Scotland's councils to keep Scotland beautiful and their cleanup Scotland campaign. I applaud them for helping to keep Scotland and make it beautiful. Excellent. I now move to the open debate. I call on Christine Grahame to be followed by Jackie Baillie four minutes or thereby please. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I congratulate Bruce Crawford on securing this debate and on Keep Scotland Beautiful campaign, because the issue of public dropping litter is one of my bugbears. A head, incidentally, of queue jumpers in the supermarket or motorists who can see that lane ahead is blocked but expect to nudge in when they have reached the ball-ards. That makes it pretty high as a bugbear. Whether it is school children dropping the baked potato or pizza box, the parent letting their child drop lollipop wrappers or worse, doing it themselves in front of their children, the motorist gaily rolling down the window and brazenly emptying the ashtray, I see red. Logoed carrier bags waving at me from the trees, stuck on fences, the debris, the detritus on our shores, I would wish we could name and shame big time the culprits. I went on a trip to Bruges some years ago and settled myself in the square to people watch as I coughed a light lager to wash down some muscles. The square is quaint and apart from the horse-drawn tourist carriages, and by the way, the horses have a special chute attachment to catch their detritus, it's a people place. But there was something very different about the scene apart from the above and I couldn't quite put my finger on it, then I realised there was not one single piece, nay, even a speck of litter. Could any of us say the same for any square or main street in our constituencies? Some even think it macho, a macho gesture to throw litter, no wonder we call them litter louts. Visually it is vandalism with a capital V. It also costs in money and manpower. Midlothian Council spends approximately £850,000 a year on litter removal and street sweeping. It has alone 250 instances of fly tipping from the single item that ubiquitous mattress or the saggy bottom sofa to tipping on an industrial scale. It costs in animal welfare. Discarded fishing tackle causes misery for swans, plastic bags, choked livestock, fish in our seas have their very DNA altered by our disposal of chemical waste. For farmers additionally to the issue of livestock harm, there is a substantial issue of fly tipping, which affects farmers across the borders of Midlothian. It is estimated that some one-third of farms are affected. I may be wrong in this, cabinet secretary, but I understand that it is the landowner who is responsible for the cost of the removal. I am many faults, deputy Presiding Officer, as you know, but being guilty of littering is not one. We have laws, of course, but many are unaware of them and who always has the confidence to confront the culprit. Until society views littering with the same abhorrence and distaste as it says, spitting in public, I am afraid that we will never see the clingliness of bruise here. To put it succinctly, if I were a guest on the television programme Room 101, I would advocate depositing litter, all litter. I have that off my chest, but welcome the continuing work of Keith Scotland, beautiful and hope, though I have to say with this caveat not a great deal of optimism that I need not rant on this issue again. Again, I congratulate Bruce Crawford on bringing forward this debate. Excellent. I now call on Jackie Baillie to be followed by Graham Day. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. Can I too join in congratulating Bruce Crawford on securing debating time and indeed for the content of his contribution? They do say that timing is everything in politics, so we should perhaps note to the reception for Keith Scotland, beautiful in the garden lobby at six o'clock and welcome the clean-up Scotland champions from all across the country to Parliament this evening, and their efforts should indeed be applauded. There is no doubt that we live in a beautiful country. I am proud to have Scotland's first national park in my constituency, shared in part with Bruce Crawford. Loch Lomond is of course iconic and draws visitors from home as well as abroad. We have the most amazing landscapes, dramatic coastlines and just occasionally nice weather to go with it, but of course the blot on our landscape is litter. The stats do bear repeating because I didn't realise the scale of the problem, the 250 million visible items every year. When you actually think about as you're driving along looking at the grass verges, looking at the hedges, you actually begin to understand the scale of the problem that we face. I couldn't believe that there were 170 incidents of fly tipping every day. I suspect that that is the tip of the iceberg, that's only what we know about. It isn't just the grass verges and the hedges, it's the city streets that are littered with whether it's detritus from food or cigarettes or indeed anything like that. I was struck by the example that Christine Grahame gave of Bruges. I actually grew up in Hong Kong. We ran litter campaigns. There weren't so many grass verges there, but we actually had a purple dragon called Lopsapchung and as a child I was most fearful of this purple dragon appearing, but I'll tell you the streets in Hong Kong are absolutely spotless and there is maybe something we can learn from what goes on there. Indeed, sometimes in this chamber we could do with that dragon back to handle you. I would suggest that that's the role of the Presiding Officer, not that I'm suggesting that he is a purple dragon. When you consider the culture that we seem to have, of just drop it behind you, leave it behind, throw it out of the car window, it is perhaps not astonishing that we have the scale of the problem that we do. Keep Scotland Beautiful and the Clean-up Scotland campaign are absolutely vital. The fact that they have encouraged an army of volunteers—yes, that includes many of us—to undertake the scale of voluntary activity, the 300 clean-ups every month, the picking up thousands of litter is just fantastic. I know because I have participated and I have to confess that it's not just about doing something that's useful for the environment, it's great exercise and you absolutely switch off from the myriad things that we have going on in our heads. I was at Levengrove Park, I was at the beach at Dumbarton, yes, we have one, I was at Dumbarton Castle on the banks of the Clyde, there have been litter picks in Helensborough, there is a litter pick in Lus on the banks of Loch Lomond on the 7th of March, I invite you all along to participate, it will be fun. But I commend the Keep Scotland Beautiful campaign, not just for the mass engagement that they have encouraged, but because they have brought together communities, local authorities, the public sector, the third sector businesses, they have had a great job in putting everybody together to take co-ordinated action. As we have heard from Bruce, 80 local national and global brands, McDonalds, Greggs, William Tracy, Wrigley's, Coca-Cola Enterprises, all recognising that we need to do more. It isn't just the visual impact of what is known as environmental incivility, the issue is a lesson of civic pride, a negative impact on wildlife, both on land and marine areas, negative health and social justice outcomes. I'm conscious of time, but let me mention an impact on farms in my area, because I was approached by the national farmers union of Scotland. They reported dogfowling in fields having huge impact on the wellbeing of livestock, with cattle miscarrying on a regular basis. I understand that perhaps there is a consultation, if I'm right, being undertaken, but I would be pleased to hear from the cabinet secretary about what more can be done to prevent this in future, because it is an increasing problem and we do need to help. Education officers has a hugely important role to play in encouraging the next generation not to litter. I know locally that eco schools, part of what keeps Scotland beautiful, have made a huge impact. Education is about changing attitudes and behaviour. We need to make it socially unacceptable to drop litter. Our strategy needs to be about ensuring that people take personal responsibility, that they are proactive about prevention, that enforcement action is there so that those who litter are fine. Finally, not that you are a purple dragon, I congratulate Keep Scotland Beautiful on their work and commend all the volunteers and partners across Scotland for their involvement. One of the key themes to emerge from the work done by the rural affairs, climate change and the environment committee of this Parliament in relation to tackling climate change is the critical need to bring about behavioural change. We will not respond to the challenges posed by global warming, we do not take drastic action to tackle our emissions and we will only successfully tackle emissions if, as a society and individuals, we alter our behaviours. Presiding Officer, in many respects the same essentially applies to addressing the scandal of littering, a subject that I know you take a personal interest in. As the Scottish Government's litter strategy towards a litter-free Scotland has almost as its mission statement, we need to encourage individuals to take personal responsibility to make sure that waste does not pollute the environment in the first place. It truly is a national disgrace that a country as beautiful as Scotland is blighted by littering to the extent it is. The fact that it costs an estimated £78 million annually to clean up litter gives us an idea of the scale of the issue. That figure ultimately borne by the wee taxpayers of course also hammers home the price of behaving in what is a socially unacceptable way. However, it does just seem that, just as the public are beginning to embrace recycling, so they are getting on board and tackling the littering issue. Let me congratulate my colleague Bruce Crawford on bringing forward this motion for debate and highlighting the vehicle for positive behavioural change that KSB's Clean Up Scotland campaign is. The campaign has attracted a coalition of support from the business community and local authorities, and I want to return to the local authority issue in a second. More than anything, it is buying from individuals and local groups, which ultimately will determine the success or otherwise of the campaign, because if the ambition to have 1 million people taking action with the demonstrable impact that will have on our environment is realised, we will find ourselves in a far better place. However, let us also recognise the leadership role that our councils must have and are fulfilling. In the local authority area, which I represent, a Clean Up Angus campaign is being supported by the Pride and Place group of the council. Funding received from Zero Waste Scotland is being deployed in two innovative litter projects. First, we will prevent litter and pick up three campaigns, which were launched earlier this month at the Westlinks area in Arbro. That aims to reduce incidences of littering between Arbro and East Haven by encouraging all users—local residents, visitors etc—to stop littering and to pick up any three items of litter that they see and place them in a nearby litter or recycling bin. Secondly, the Forth Academy litter prevention scheme, which includes adoption of a school litter charter and school pupils and staff and local business is heavily involved in developing the campaign. That followed a survey of school pupils, which found that 84 per cent felt that the area around the campus was moderately to heavily littered, and one in three admitted to littering themselves in the preceding month. We are also seeing branding of new litter bins with a Clean Up Angus logo. The campaign is being promoted via presentations at primary and high schools, free equipment and collection of waste has been offered to groups. A litter awareness short film is currently being produced, linked into the Clean Up Angus campaign. Beyond the work instigated by the council, we are also seeing the individuals and communities sticking up to the mark. Presiding Officer, I would like to highlight some examples of this. Scott Smith, a cerebral palsy sufferer from Cymru, was named Clean Up Scotland's first ever ditched-the-dirt hero in September 2013. Scott was involved in taking the lead in working with primary school pupils at Burnside school and the Canusti Canine capers group in addressing dog dirt at one of the Townspitskelly park. It is worth noting that, in passing, 64 per cent of the litter picks registered with Clean Up Scotland record instances of dog fouling. Chris Hawkinglack of the Money Feith Eco Force was named hero of the month that same month for working on improving the appearance and experience of that town. From four for Whitehall's primary school pupil, Sophie Ann Robson was awarded the Queen Up Hero Award in 2013 for her campaigning work on dog fouling. All three are due to the 10 Bruce Crawford's event in the Parliament, which follows this debate. All three have demonstrated the mantra of this campaign, demonstrating civic responsibility, taking pride in where they live, work and spend their leisure time, and we, all of us, show we must follow that weed. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I, too, congratulate Bruce Crawford on securing this important debate. I want to recognise the good work of Keep Scotland Beautiful and its Clean Up Scotland campaign. Litter in our environment can seriously impact on our quality of life, and the presence of litter sends out an incredibly bad message to visitors and tourists, many of whom are attracted to our shores by what they expect to be our pristine natural environment and well-kept villages, towns and cities, and the costs of remedying litter fall on the hard-pressed taxpayers. The motion is right to highlight the commendable efforts of those who volunteer to help clean up their communities, including many thousands of residents in my region and the Highlands and Islands. I pay tribute to all those constituents who give up their own time to undertake these activities from Quintar to Shetland. I highlight the example of Sandra Macmillan from Beachwatch Bute, who does sterling work on Bute to bring local people and visitors to the island together to remove litter from the coastline and the beach of Bute. She is a Clean Up Scotland hero, and I am delighted that she has won a number of small litter grants to assist her efforts. Tackling litter on our beaches and coastlines is a massive challenge. Sam's did a survey in 2010 and collected more than 53,000 pieces of litter from a sample of 22 kilometres of Scottish beaches. That's more than one item for every step trod. Litter can also do such harm to our wild birds and animals, and, of course, it can be lethal to farmers' livestock. The motion refers also to the role of the business community, and I'm pleased that Coca-Cola Enterprise is one of a number of businesses which readily accepts the part they can play in the cleanup of their product packaging. It's encouraging that Coca-Cola Enterprise is helping to fund and support KSB, allowing them to back up local groups who wish to tackle the scourge of litter in their communities. Things do go better with Coke. We also need to see the behaviour change to which Bruce Crawford referred, and education is the key in this respect. I support the efforts to engage primary and secondary school children about the impact of litter on their own communities. Education can help all to add up behaviour as well. Ash Scotland's briefing for today said that almost 50 per cent of our streets have some form of tobacco-related litter, including cigarette butts matched in packaging, and that this rises to 70 per cent in urban areas. Many smokers think butts will buy a grade, but they don't. And not only that, but discarded butts end up, can leak harmful toxins into our water system that can harm marine life and the environment. So we need to get the message out that tobacco-related littering is unacceptable, as indeed all types of littering is. Highland Council in my region is to be congratulated on its Stubbitt and Binit campaign, which launched last year. Now, I sometimes wish that some local councils would be more generous in aiding litter collection by volunteers. I've been chairman of the Lockhall Improvement Association in Argyll since 1992. During that time, we've organised many clean-ups by volunteers, and our wardens pick up bags of rubbish off the lockshore every week. But Argyll and Bygley, the Association has to pay £380 each for the large bins, of which we have several, and we have to pay hundreds of pounds for black bags, and we have then charged £2,300 for uplifting them. Now, the Association is doing a good job and feels it is performing a valuable voluntary service by running a litter collection locally. We feel that we should be helped by the council rather than charged for it. I would like to know what the minister's opinion is on that, but to conclude, the Scottish Conservatives are happy to give our backing to Bruce Crawford's motion, which rightly has cross-party support. We recognise the continuing efforts of Keep Scotland Beautiful and all the volunteers throughout the country, and the excellent work that is being undertaken, while also acknowledging the real challenges that we face to change behaviour of some people and move towards a situation in which littering is simply socially and culturally totally unacceptable. I, too, welcome Bruce Crawford's initiative in bringing this debate forward today. I also share his passions for tourism and for having a litter-free country. I also welcome the efforts of Keep Scotland Beautiful and General Community Scotland in efforts and campaigns to clean up individual communities across Scotland. When I first entered this Parliament in 2011, I was minded to aim to bring in a private member's bill on litter. I withdrew that intent on the commitment of the Government to bring in extended proposals to deal with the issue. As the motion points out, some steps have been clearly taken, particularly via the Clean Up Scotland campaign. That was and is good news and effective. However, Mr Crawford's motion rightly points out the scale of the problem remaining and that significant further progress requires to be made on levels of litter. Yes, that requires significant behavioural change, but it also requires further legislation, I believe, to support our objectives. I note and welcome the significant changes that the increase has made in the fixed penalties order 2013, increasing penalties in littering, flight tiffing and so on. That seems to have had some effect, but we need more. As has been said, littering is a blight on Scotland, our country. This country is a beautiful country, but litter is one of the few factors—in some cases a major factor—not just on the beauty of Scotland but also on its economy. We do not want litter to be a bad experience for our tourists or, indeed, our citizens. The £60 million of public money that is spent on tackling litter and flight tiffing each year could be spent on other services. One ton of litter represents 20,000 items, which, spread, nose to tail, extends for 12.5 miles. I know where is this more obvious than in our town centres. Oh, I wish that here where near Atun surpasses was known for honest men and boring glasses and not, in some cases, for the litter on its streets. Let me dwell on two suggestions to add to the debate on litter, particularly in our town centre areas. The dropping or spitting out of chewing gum is an offence under section 87 of the Environmental Protection Act, yet the pavements and the streets of our town centre still suffer from a chewing gum pox. That has to be eliminated. I repeat my previous suggestions in the obvious absence of the application of penalties that the local sale of non-biodegradable chewing gum attracts a levy of, let's say, an additional £10 a pack, which will be attributed to local authorities to allow them to clean up the chewing gum mess. The second suggestion is to encourage the creation of a social enterprise in each locality. Each enterprise, and I've had discussions on this and proposals on this locally, use rickshaws with bins aboard to ensure that litter outlets get the message and have the opportunity to deposit their litter appropriately. Each rickshaw rider to have a helmet-bearing webcam to record and immediately find those who continue to drop their litter in the streets. Funding could come from the £60 million that we currently spend on tackling litter. In Singapore, we may never be, but I believe that we can still make even greater strides. Certainly, we have done well and I congratulate Keep Scotland Beautiful and we have made progress, but a lot more needs to be done. Of course, I congratulate Bruce Crawford and thank him for raising this important issue in Parliament today and of course to all members for their contributions. I think that we can hear that many members have been angered by the scale of littering in Scotland and will be tied by any litter layout that comes across Christine Grahame in particular, who understandably is very angered by what we sometimes see in our communities and across Scotland's beautiful landscapes. Likewise, I look forward to welcoming many people involved in this issue from across Scotland at the reception that is being hosted after this debate. Clearly, we all agree that litter is a disgusting blight on our communities and their coasts. Of course, it tarnishes our beautiful landscapes and harms public health, as many people have mentioned, and of course our wildlife. In many cases, where there are particularly extreme examples of litter, it can drag down the morale of some of Scotland's communities as well. We all, of course, agree that this is a problem that absolutely must be addressed. Many of you will identify with some of the points that I am going to say. Of course, I will do my best to reflect on some of the points that were made by members in the chamber. First and foremost, of course, is that there are many different people responsible for dealing with this issue, and our local authorities, of course, must speak the forefront of the fight against litter. Many local authorities in Scotland are doing a grand job, others perhaps do more, as some members mentioned, and I hope that they do that. There are, of course, other issues. This is not just about bottles and cans and fag packets. As some members mentioned, Jackie Baillie mentioned the issue of dogfowling, which, of course, again is a blight on some of our communities. Again, local authorities have powers to deal with that, and I would urge those who perhaps are not using existing legislation to explore whether there is more that they can do to address that issue with the existing fines that are available. Jackie Baillie Can I thank the cabinet secretary for taking an intervention? We have exchanged correspondence, and my understanding was that the legislation did not cover farmland because it was private land, and there was concern about the scope of local authorities to be able to enforce. I wonder if there is not something clever that we could do to try and help farmers with this problem. Yes, I was clearly referring to dogfowling generally, but in terms of farmland, I take the point that perhaps we should be exploring if there is more that we can do, and I will have a look at that. However, I do hope that local authorities can use existing fines that are available. However, it was part of the responsible dog ownership consultation that took place recently. We are considering the responses to that consultation, and dogfowling was part of that. One of the clear messages that came across was that there is more that needs to be done at local level with existing legislation. Emma Greggor I thank the cabinet secretary for taking the intervention. Should organisations or councils wish to put out or give out plastic bags to dog owners to pick up the excrement? Will the 5P tax be charged on those plastic bags? Can I make the obvious point that responsible dog ownership means that you get your own bags and you look after your own dogs fouling on our streets and communities in Scotland? What I find appalling is how nowadays, when we go out into the countryside, we find little doggie bags on the post's offences that should be taken home and disposed of appropriately by dog owners. I hope that message gets across in the future. One other issue that we agree on is that the total cost is unacceptable to society of littering. As many members have said, it is £78 million a year. At least £53 million of this is direct clear-up costs, and a further £25 million through its effect on a range of other issues such as crime, health and reduced property values. Over and above that, there is a further cost to the marine environment of £16.8 million each and every year. Of course, that impacts on our environment, wildlife industry and tourism. As Jamie MacGregor said, marine litter is not just about the impact on marine wildlife, it is also a significant issue for the fishing industry. Vessels participating in the fishing for litter initiative landed over 374 tonnes of litter between 2011 and 2014, and it is estimated that the problem costs every vessel in the Scottish fleet as much as £17,000 annually, which is quite considerable. Of course, all of that cash could be spent on better things, especially when you consider the discarded plastic bottles that we see or aluminium cans and other materials are said to be worth an estimated £1.2 million when recycled. If we reuse the resources that are dumped in our pavements and communities or at sea, we could get millions of pounds back from the value of those valuable materials. In addressing the litter problem, the national litter strategy and the marine litter counterpart, which we launched last summer, also seeks to boost our economy. The priority remains prevention, and it provides a focus to strategy for all of us to take responsibility over the next four years. That is being supported by our delivery partner Zero Waste Scotland. Zero Waste Scotland has already made £1.5 million available to keep Scotland Beautiful's clean-up Scotland campaign. Keep Scotland Beautiful, of course, has many, many challenges to deal with, not least cleaning up the mess left by litter louts in Scotland, but it is, of course, quite rightly relying on local action taken by individuals, groups and businesses and councils. I am particularly pleased that clean-up Scotland is celebrating local champions, like, for instance, young Brona Dallas from Elgin, in my constituency, who picks up litter every day on her way home from school or to school. Indeed, the Northern Scotland reported that the first thing that she does when she gets home, before she does her homework, is to go on a litter pick on the streets around her home. It goes on to say the article in the Northern Scotland and she even drags her mum and other family members out on litter picks after school and weekends. Brona, of course, is an inspiration to her generation and, indeed, to the rest of us in Scotland and is a worthy local champion, as indeed are the many people mentioned but other members in the chamber today. I should also mention Pete Miners in my constituency, who patrols the River Lossy and has done for many, many years picking up marine litter and he puts on Facebook the pictures of what he finds. It is absolutely phenomenal the piles of marine litter and other litter that he collects on his daily walks along the River Lossy banks. With around half a million volunteer clean-ups taking place across Scotland, tens of thousands of tonnes of litter have been removed, so we owe a huge debt to the many hundreds of thousands of volunteers across Scotland. That is a great achievement, but we still have a situation where one in five adults admit to littering and therefore the problem persists. We have to also remember that Keep Scotland Beautiful and our local authorities are not the only organisations with interests and responsibilities in this area. This is something that we all have to be part of, organisations, individuals and indeed the private sector as well. I recently visited a McDonald's restaurant in Elgin, where, of course, they undertake some activities around the restaurant in the neighbouring streets to collect litter, and it is really important that our private sector continues to play their part as well. In summary, the strategy that the Government has launched has three routes for dealing with the problem of litter in Scotland. First, communication, highlighting what to do and explaining that litter is unacceptable. Secondly, making sure that the appropriate infrastructure is available for people to deposit their litter. Thirdly, enforcement as a deterrent to make people stop and think. We have already introduced higher fixed penalties, £80 for littering and £200 for fly-tipping to strengthen the deterrent. We have, of course, got the carrier bag charged in place now, which should, I hope, fully keep bags from being discarded in our streets, because people will be using bags for life, and there will be less bags circulating in our society, hopefully. Of course, we had the national marketing campaign in 2014 as well, and there are on-going communications to keep this issue in the public eye. Finally, we are rolling out recycling the go points across some of Scotland's most busiest places. To sum up, I welcome this debate. It is a really important issue for Scotland. I hope that we continue to work and collaborate across society to make this socially unacceptable, as many members have said. It is socially unacceptable. It is a vandalism in Scotland's environment and in Scotland's communities. We have to deal with it, so let's please keep working together, as Proust Crawford says, and keep Scotland beautiful.