The father of the youngest witness ever to give evidence to the London Assembly to date equated graffiti to the spraying of tomcats. I don’t know if he was suggesting neutering for our young male population – but it’s a thought!

The 14-year-old boy was terrific, and of course, he only used legal walls and decorated his schoolbooks with ‘tags’. For the uninitiated, a tag is a kind of logo of your chosen brand name for yourself, with the idea being to spray it on as many places as possible so it can be seen by as many of your graffiti peers as possible. To the eye of the graffer these are works of art and beauty. A ‘legal wall,’ used in some areas, is a surface for use by graffiti artists and sometimes supervised as a community project. Of course, as part of the point of making your mark is to be anti-establishment, a lot of taggers sneer at a legal wall.

To some, it may be a work of art – but to me it just looks like a mess. Pillar boxes, walls, fences, utility boxes, shop fronts, viaducts, railway walls – it’s everywhere now – rich and poor neighbourhoods alike – graffiti knows no boundaries. And now the windows of our buses, tubes and trains are also etched with graffiti – expensive to replace and no means of painting it over or cleaning it off. So how do we deal with this epidemic of graffiti and clash of desires between those who want to live in clean neighbourhoods and those who want to leave their mark?

At the London Assembly, I am on an investigative panel looking at this challenge. The level of resources and the political will that different boroughs commit to dealing with graffiti varies hugely from £15,000 to £600,000 per annum across London. The political will goes hand in hand with the money. The solutions emerging from our scrutiny combine a range of best practice from different boroughs -from improving youth facilities, providing legal walls, having a policy of instant removal, supplying cleaning materials free to volunteers in the community, having a clear enforcement regime for those caught (it is a crime), involving parents and so on. There are many things that can be done and we will be disseminating our findings in due course.

One thing we found from New York’s experience on the subway was that instant removal took away the point for the taggers. In my own dear borough of Haringey, however, graffiti usually remains in place for months, if not years or even decades – thus encouraging others to join in with their own tags. Graffiti is only removed promptly if it is racist or obscene – rarely otherwise. Recently, there has been a huge rise in reports of graffiti and so I have been putting together an information sheet for my local area on how to get graffiti removed and who can do it, etc. Local residents, knowing my abiding interest in graffiti,started reporting to me sightings of a mystery woman removing graffiti in the Highgate area from walls, fences and utility boxes. Three cheers I thought – power to the people.

Last week my sister telephoned me to say that she had had a brilliant idea – why didn’t councils train volunteers to clean off graffiti themselves? She then told me that the idea had struck her when she was out cleaning graffiti of utility and post boxes the week before. So that’s who the mystery woman was – my own sister!

But if it is my sister who is cleaning the utility boxes, who is the other woman who is cleaning it off the walls and fences? Whoever they are, they are demonstrating how effectively we can make a difference in our communities when we put our minds to it. So thank you sister and thank you other mystery woman.