Amber helps clean beach for the Queen

The Clean started outside of the RNLI Hastings Lifeboat Station and worked its way along the seafront, heading towards the Pier, collecting all different types of litter from plastic bottles to items of clothing. The Clean Team was formed of a dozen people, being led by Amber Rudd, all of who collected at least one large refuse sack of rubbish each.

Amber commented: “Thank you to everyone who attended last Saturday. I am extremely pleased with how much litter we managed to pick up - it shows how effective community social action events, like this one, can be in tackling these everyday tasks which are of a real benefit to our town.”

Altogether, across the UK more than a million people have been out and about clearing up the places where they live to help celebrate the Queen’s 90th birthday in April.

The campaign, backed by organisations including the Women’s Institute, the National Trust and the RSPB, as well as businesses including McDonald’s, Costa, Greggs, KFC and Wrigley and anti-litter charities such as Keep Britain Tidy and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, was the biggest community-led clean-up the country has ever seen.

A recent survey conducted by Populus found that 90 per cent of respondents consider litter to be a massive issue, with 81 per cent saying that seeing litter makes them angry and frustrated.

The Clean for The Queen event started off as a conversation between a handful of organisations, fed up with the continuing littering that affects the UK. The ambition was to get one million people engaged.

Campaign director Adrian Evans said: “Our ambition is to create a community inspired, grass-roots mass action event – one that will become a recurring annual initiative. We want to show that millions of people in this country care passionately about litter.”

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