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Northamptonshire Wombles group joins litter summit in Parliament

BBC Northants Litter WomblesBBC
The team went to Parliament wearing their Northants Litter Wombles tabards

A volunteer group tackling litter met with politicians in Parliament to discuss issues in their county.

Northants Litter Wombles attended a "litter summit" on Tuesday to argue more needs to be done to tackle litter in Northamptonshire.

The meeting was attended by environmental quality minister Rebecca Pow along with MPs and councillors from the county.

Litter picker Alison McClean described the meeting as "really enlightening".

"It was really heartening to learn most of the issues we raised are already under discussion by government," she said.

The group, named after the fictional litter-picking creatures that had a BBC TV programme and several hit singles, said one of the major things they wanted to discuss was fly-tipping.

Wombles
The Wombles books by Elizabeth Beresford were turned into a BBC children's television series in the 1970s, and Mike Batt wrote a series of hit singles for them

The minister told the group fly-tipping incidents were down 4% and fixed penalty notices up 58% over the past year and that the government was determined to do more by awarding councils grants to strengthen powers "to detect and prosecute waste criminals, and [was] planning to introduce new rules to crack down further".

"It is encouraging to see that there are a growing number of public-spirited individuals and community groups such as the Northants Litter Wombles tackling litter all over the country," she added.

The "Litter Summit"
The Northants Litter Wombles hoped meetings like this one could happen twice a year

The Northants Litter Wombles previously ran an experiment to put pop-up bins in areas with a litter problem, now they want to push local MPs to provide more permanent bins in the county.

North Northamptonshire councillor Matt Binley said there were 3,000 dog waste and general waste bins in that district and increasing that number would require "extensive analysis to see if that's feasible".

Andrew Lewer, Conservative MP for Northampton South, was also complimentary about the group's work and encouraged them to continue "keeping their county and my town as clean as possible".

BBC Politics East will be broadcast on Sunday, 29 October at 10:00 BST on BBC One and available after broadcast on BBC iPlayer.

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