National Litter and Flytipping Strategy: Update and Year 2 Action Plan

This report sets out the progress made on delivering the National Litter and Flytipping Strategy (NLFS) and contains updates on the Year One Action Plan and outlines actions for Year 2, this includes a number of continuing actions that have been progressing since 1 April 2024.


3 Ongoing activity and new actions

Continuing actions have been delivered since 1 April 2024. New actions have a blue background and will be progressed by 31 March 2025.

Year 2 action Lead Organisation
Litter
1. Targeted behaviour-based interventions (Continuation of Year 1 Action 2): Work with key stakeholders (local authorities, duty bodies and businesses) to use existing qualitative and quantitative data to identify and target litter types or items (including new and emerging types), develop, and implement an innovative behaviour-based intervention (for example, assessing the effectiveness and costs of intervention to tackle roadside litter using new littering from vehicles provision), evaluating its impact and potential for wider roll-out. Keep Scotland Beautiful
2. Empowering communities (Continuation of Year 1 Action 3): Further develop and expand the Hub to widen range of information, advice and support available to community groups and other local organisations (including peer support) to enable them to tackle litter and littering behaviour, and provide basic information for communities in relation to flytipping. Keep Scotland Beautiful
3. Engaging communities (Continuation of Year 1 Action 4): Implement a phased roll out of education programme nationally to build capacity and capability in community groups and other local organisations to tackle litter and littering behaviour. Keep Scotland Beautiful
Flytipping
4. Improve communications on current householder duty of care obligations in relation to the disposal household waste. All delivery partners will consider action that can be taken to raise awareness of the duty of care in advance of the Circular Economy Act section that will introduce the Fixed Penalty Notice regime coming into force. All partners
5. Support householders to dispose of waste responsibly. SEPA will promote the waste carriers register on the SEPA website and review public accessibility to the information. Scottish Environment Protection Agency
6. Sharing information and best practice (Continuation of Year 1 Action 8): Share information and support resource sharing between key stakeholders and fora including the Litter Managers Network, SPARC and Flytipping Forum. Scottish Government
7. Review the role and remit of the Flytipping Forum to ensure the current approach is helpful to sharing expertise, information and co-ordinated action. Scottish Government
8. Improve enforcement by providing the Cairngorms National Park Authority with enforcement powers, replicating the current powers that Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park have. Scottish Government
9. Improving enforcement work with COPFS to ensure any guidance or other relevant resources is shared with stakeholders where appropriate. Scottish Government
10. Clarification of roles and responsibilities (Continuation of Year 1 Action 10): SEPA will extend and expand the trial of the new enforcement approach model to more local authority areas. Scottish Environment Protection Agency
11. Support for landowners (Continuation of Year 1 Action 11): the landowners guidance document will continue to be developed with case studies from the grant fund applicants, good practice from landowners and information on section 59[7]. The other flagged issues will be taken to SDG to consider how best to progress. A landowners group will be formally established to support this. Scottish Environment Protection Agency
12. Private landowner’s grant (Continuation of Year 1 Action 11): Zero Waste Scotland will promote and administer the relaunched grant in 2024/25 and will continue to encourage development of innovative projects that aim to prevent flytipping on private land. Zero Waste Scotland
13. Use digital technologies to detect and disrupt flytippers (Continuation of Year 1 Action 12): Continue to use digital interventions to deter and disrupt unregistered waste carriers advertising online (as well as rogue operators operating behind a waste carrier registration). Scottish Environment Protection Agency
Litter and Flytipping
14. Joint working with stakeholders (Continuation of Year 1 Action 14): Through engagement with stakeholders, develop an approach to improving the effectiveness, efficiency and consistency of prevention activity, building on engagement undertaken in Year 1. Zero Waste Scotland
Data Improvement: Litter and Flytipping
15. Development of a Litter & Flytipping Data Strategy (continuing Action 15 in Year 1): the Data Management Group will review the recommendations paper and support the development of a work plan to continue to development of the Data Strategy. Zero Waste Scotland
16.

Developing litter data (continuing Action 16): Building on existing litter data collection and analysis, engage with a wider range of stakeholders and ensure a common approach to data management, analysis and use - improving collection, analysis and use of data, based on initial activity completed in Year 1, linking with the data strategy and development of LMS, including the prioritisation of data sets collected in Year 1 and the use, relevance and data sharing agreements.

Also building on identified gaps in data collection in Year 1, defining options for collecting the missing data and potentially engaging with academics to research the cause and effect of littering, utilising current litter data.

Keep Scotland Beautiful
17. Improving consistency of litter data (continuing Action 17): Actively promote and improve quality and consistency of citizen science to support litter data collection and complement existing programmes and utilising the Delivery Plan developed in Year 1. Keep Scotland Beautiful
18. Leadership, management, and facilitation of the Data Management Group to support litter and flytipping data actions, (Continuation of Actions 15-19), recognising that the group provides an important resource for the development and delivery of these actions. Keep Scotland Beautiful
19. Developing flytipping data: map the data collection process currently being undertaken by enforcement agencies against the information that they can be required to supply to Scottish Ministers (as set out in Section 13 of the Circular Economy Act) to better understand the most effective way to progress towards effective and accurate national reporting Scottish Government

Contact

Email: NLFS@gov.scot

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