Updated: CHILDREN in East Yorkshire have been slapped with £75 fines under a “zero tolerance” litter crackdown.

Street cleaning officials and police have been running lunch-time patrols in streets near secondary schools, to try to combat the problem.

A new report says that 29 warning letters and seven £75 fines have been issued this year, while 19 first offenders have attended one of four supervised litter picks, as an alternative to the fine.

Officials at East Riding of Yorkshire Council are now to give police the power to issue such fines on the council’s behalf, which could see more children being punished.

The patrols have followed a series of visits and school assemblies, at which council staff have told pupils about the problem and the penalties.

Nigel Leighton, the council’s director of environment and neighbourhood services, said penalties had become necessary as warnings were ignored.

“There is an important role for educative and marketing messages but unfortunately these are not wholly successful in the creation and maintenance of clean, safe and green neighbourhoods. Increasingly, there is a need and a demand for enforcement action.”

He said residents supported such fines, as long as they were “appropriately handled” and said littering outside secondary schools had been one of the department’s biggest challenges.

New studies to be presented to the council’s environment and transport overview and scrutiny committee tomorrow show street cleanliness in the county has improved over the past year.

In 2008/9, seven per cent of streets had an unacceptable amount of litter but this fell to four per cent this year, while the number with unacceptable amounts of detritus fell from 16 per cent to eight per cent.