By John Crawford

FOR most council cleansing officers, the end of the summer holidays means reorganising weekday workloads to cope with clearing up the additional litter and mess left at secondary school gates after lunch breaks.

Despite working in the business for decades I’d never been able to crack this problem and it took some creative thinking by younger colleagues to solve it. By then councils could issue fixed penalty notices to litterers but the procedure wasn’t straightforward. Unlike cars, people don’t carry visible identities so if a litterer provided a bogus name, the chances of collecting the fine were small. There was also an issue of our staff approaching pupils at the school gates and jeopardising the council’s "stranger/danger" initiatives. But as there was less chance of giving a false name and address to a police officer, there was still scope for trying a new approach. So after securing the approval of the council leader and the leader of the main opposition party, we wrote to the Head of Schools saying that we’d soon be patrolling the secondary school gates at lunchtimes and any pupil seen dropping litter would get a fixed penalty notice. We understood the letter was read out at all the secondary schools at their Assemblies shortly afterwards.

Then we arranged for Community Police Officers (they wore overcoats on top of their uniforms) to accompany our staff on lunchtime patrols. The first day we caught around a dozen teenagers dropping litter at various school gates. Our officer and the cop had approached the miscreant, showed their warrant cards and asked for their name, address and class. When the school went back in, the team went to the head teacher’s office, the individual was called in and our staff issued a fixed penalty notice. The police also wrote to their parents/guardians in case the penalty notice might "get lost".

But there was a backlash. One or two parents (oddly, most from what was considered the more "affluent" areas) kicked up a stushie, the complaints including "we’ve always taught our son/daughter not to talk to strangers and you’ve traumatised them by doing this". But other parents phoned up to assure us the fine had been taken seriously, their son/daughter had been grounded and payment of the fine would be met by deductions from their pocket money.

The bonus for the cleansing service was that instead of spending up to 45 minutes every day at each secondary school gates, they only needed 5-10 minutes to clear up the lunchtime litter.

It’s nearly two decades since this approach was conceived and introduced in East Ayrshire so why hasn’t Keep Scotland Beautiful and the hierarchy at Zero Waste Scotland promoted it as an example of good practice that works? Or is it simply easier to deplore the dirty habits of a section of the Scottish population rather than do something positive about it?

* The author spent more than 50 years in the Scottish waste industry.