Public ‘greatly over-estimates number of Muslims in Britain’

A study by an industry body has found a 1 per cent increase in litter since the Scottish Government launched a new litter-free strategy two years ago.

According to the survey, supermarket carrier bag litter is up 38 per cent since 2014 despite the introduction of the carrier-bag charge during the same period.

The analysis, commissioned by the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment, was conducted by Keep Scotland Beautiful at 120 sites in Edinburgh, Falkirk, Renfrewshire and Inverness in October 2016.

Smaller items such as cigarette butts and gum made up the bulk of the total litter count, while larger pieces were comprised of paper, sweet wrappers, soft drink cans and plastic soft drink bottles. Britons greatly over-estimate the proportion of Muslims living in the country and think the number is growing at a rate far greater than it really is, a new study claims.

The Perils of Perception survey, released by Ipsos MORI yesterday, aims to highlight how wrong people are about key global and national issues and is carried out in 40 different countries.

For Britain, the results found respondents believed one in six civilians is Muslim when the real proportion is less than one in 20. The poll also showed members of the public think 22 per cent of the UK population will be Muslim by 2020, when researchers put the figure at closer to 6 per cent.