CPRE President’s view

Published in The Times: Monday 7 April 2008

Bill Bryson in Durham, March 2008. Photo © CPRE / Chris Leslie

Now here is a fact to make you sit up. In the three years to last November, the city of Sheffield recorded a rather whopping (but by no means exceptional) 441,361 instances of fly-tipping. In the same period, it managed to catch and prosecute exactly one person.

That’s pretty remarkable, but it’s not actually the fact I am on about. The fact I am on about is this: when the Department for the Environment released its latest annual fly-tipping survey, Sheffield was held up as a model because the number of fly-tipping incidents there fell from 161,000 to 108,000 over the year.

That is an improvement, to be sure, but a rather dispiriting one nonetheless. We have reached the point where when only 300 vanloads of rubbish a day are illicitly dumped along a city’s streets it is considered cheering news.

Now I am no authority on law enforcement, but it seems to me that when you have a crime in which the risks of being caught are one in 440,000, it is unlikely that people will be sufficiently unnerved to give it up. That certainly seems to be the case with fly-tipping and its ubiquitous cousin littering.

According to Environment Agency figures, 70 per cent of local authorities have not prosecuted a single fly-tipper in the last five years.

And Sheffield, incidentally, is actually comparatively diligent in terms of fly-tipping arrests. In most areas dumping rubbish carries no risk at all. According to Environment Agency figures, 70 per cent of local authorities have not prosecuted a single fly-tipper in the last five years.

With litter the chances of being caught are even slimmer. It is hard to say exactly how slim because reliable figures are so hard to come by. According to Encams, the parent body of Keep Britain Tidy, “over 30 million tonnes of litter are collected from our streets every year and an estimated 1.3 million bits of litter are dropped on our roads every weekend,” but I suspect those numbers may be a trifle fanciful. Thirty million tonnes works out at half a tonne of litter per person, which seems unlikely unless people somewhere are throwing out anvils with their crisp packets and pizza boxes, whereas 1.3 million bits of litter per weekend is almost certainly a severe underestimate.

What is certain is that a discouragingly large amount of illicit detritus ends up as a permanent landscape feature. Many local authorities remain magnificently relaxed when it comes to doing anything about it. Among those that took no action at all against litterers in the latest year for which figures are available — and this really is the barest sampling — were Eastbourne, Guildford, the New Forest, Poole, Rochford, Salisbury, Norwich, Stevenage, Warrington, Scarborough and Gateshead. Slough, heroically, managed to catch and fine one person.

The total sum of fines collected nationally last year was just slightly over £1.5 million, or about one-fifteenth of what the London borough of Kensington & Chelsea collects annually in parking fines. Of the 43,624 fines levied, only 26,818 were actually paid. Littering is not a crime that has anyone quaking for fear of the consequences because by and large there are no consequences.

A clean and lovely countryside shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be a right.

But there are consequences aplenty for all the rest of us, of course, and they are there to be seen in drifts of fluttering plastic bags and discarded tinny glitter along roads and byways up and down the country. Litter is becoming the default condition of the British roadside. Often these days you feel as if you are driving through a kind of large, informal linear tip. Surely we are entitled to expect better. A clean and lovely countryside shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be a right.

Litter breeds more litter. That is a simple, immutable fact. Clean environments tend to stay clean; dirty ones always get dirtier. If a local authority allows rubbish to pile up along its roadsides the message it sends to people driving past is: “Go ahead and drop some more. We don’t care about our corner of England. Why should you?”

CPRE’s Stop the Drop campaign
Well, we at the Campaign to Protect Rural England believe that people do care – care very much — and for the last ten months I have been talking to officials and landowners, going out with litter and fly-tipping crews, poring over parliamentary reports and drawing endlessly on the brains of CPRE staff to see if there aren’t some practical steps we can take to make things better. The result is a big, ambitious, three-year campaign called Stop the Drop, which we are launching this week, to try to get behaviour changed and laws enforced.

Let me remind you of an extremely urgent fact: nowhere in the world is there a landscape more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, more artfully worked, more visited and walked across and gazed upon than the countryside of England. It is a glorious achievement and much too lovely to trash.

It is time to get Britain tidy
Yet most authorities continue to deal with litter as if it were twenty years ago and there wasn’t much of it about. Well, I think it is time for government at all levels to recognize that things are in fact not good — that there is lots of litter and other homeless debris out there, that it is often left to accumulate for far too long, particularly in the countryside, and that decisive action needs to be taken on several fronts. We have moved past the age of Keep Britain Tidy. It is time to Get Britain Tidy.

This is not an unreasonable ambition. To achieve it, we need to make just two things happen. We need to stop litter being dropped in the first place, and we need to make sure that litter that is dropped gets picked up.

2.6 million instances of fly-tipping occur in England

Better enforcement of litter laws
In practical terms, that means instituting a few fundamental changes – like ensuring that existing laws are robustly and uniformly enforced. Litterers and fly-tippers must be made to feel that there is a reasonable chance they will be caught and that if caught they will be given a punishment that is meaningfully painful. If, for instance, you put three points on the licence of any person caught littering from a vehicle, a lot of white vans would become instantly law-abiding, believe me. If you fined them £1,000 on top, I think you would have a clean countryside pretty quickly.

People often say that catching litterers and fly-tippers is nearly impossible — Joan Ruddock, the Undersecretary of State for Environment, made this very point to me — because mostly they do it stealthily when no one is looking. Well, shoplifters are stealthy too, but they get caught often enough. It’s really just a question of training people to look in the right places at the right times.

Every year, according to Defra’s own figures, 2.6 million instances of fly-tipping occur in England. If we apprehended just 2 per cent of fly-tippers – which doesn’t seem a terribly ambitious target for such a visible and oafish crime — and fined them each £2,500, or one-twentieth of what the law actually allows, that would raise a magnificent £130 million, enough to clean up every loose scrap of litter in the country.

Alternatively, we can continue to do as we are now, which is to catch almost nobody and instead stand mutely by as another 2.6 million heaps of squalor are added to the landscape every year. Wouldn’t it make sense to invest in some special teams and equipment and see if we can’t generate some useful revenue from these devious miscreants?

All that is lacking is the will. At the moment government policy couldn’t be a great deal more remote and ineffectual. Consider this: last year Defra wrote to every local authority asking them how many Litter Clearance Notices they had issued in the previous year. Barely a quarter of authorities replied. They didn’t reply for the same reason that they almost certainly didn’t issue any Litter Clearance Notices either: because nobody really cares whether they do or not. Well, I think somebody should care. It is time for local authorities to get serious about their responsibilities and for central government to get serious about local authorities.

The Government or Defra or somebody needs to come up with a clear, coordinated, committed plan to make Britain clean again and to ensure that standards of cleanliness are met equally everywhere. What exactly that plan might consist of I am happy to leave to wiser heads, but I would respectfully suggest that any campaign ought at least to consider the following:

Better education
First, there really must be a dedicated programme of lifelong education. I am told by Encams that the Department for Education has no policy on littering and offers no special guidance to schools. That must change. It’s time we taught kids the values of decency and why it is important and right to behave responsibly, and those lessons should be reinforced throughout their lives by public service ads. (And when was the last time you saw one of those for litter?)

The authorities must take their responsibilities seriously
Then we must get existing litter cleaned up. Those who have land in their care — Network Rail, the Highways Agency, local authorities and so on — must be made to take their clearance obligations seriously. It is a little-known fact that it is illegal not only to drop litter, but to leave it uncollected. When a roadside or other public area becomes visibly degraded, by law it must be cleaned up within 60 hours at the most. In practice, of course, many areas are not cleaned up within 60 months. Where duty bodies fail to take these matters seriously – and some, frankly, are scandalously slapdash – we must be prepared to take them to court. Litter Abatement Orders were created for this very purpose, yet in the history of litter jurisprudence only one has ever been successfully taken out. Well, get ready to see more.

Recycling and environmentally friendly packaging
Manufacturers likewise must be induced to do their part — to produce biodegradable packaging, chewing gum that dissolves in the rain and so on. I am told by a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry that packaging is often carefully formulated to be nearly eternal, for the convenience of the manufacturer. So perhaps we should consider a tax on retail materials that are especially indestructible or pernicious or are a danger to wildlife. (And it is worth noting that 95 per cent of vets say they have treated animals injured or made sick by litter.)

We might also consider a tax on takeaway foods. It has always seemed to me decidedly odd that people pay a 17.5 per cent tax to sit and have food indoors, where it will be properly disposed of, but pay no surcharge to take it out into the wider world where it all too often ends up underfoot. Wouldn’t it make sense to charge take-out customers equally and use that money to clear up some of the mess their mobile consumption creates?

At the same time, we should introduce a redeemable deposit on every drink container sold. Deposit laws not only encourage recycling and discourage random discarding, but also give litter a value, which makes it attractive as a revenue source for Scouts, church groups, homeless people and a wholesomely wide range of others. When Iowa introduced a bottle deposit law 20 years ago, the amount of roadside litter fell by nearly 70 per cent at a stroke, not so much because people stopped dropping litter, but because most of it didn’t stay dropped for long.

More bins are needed
We need desperately to increase the provision of litter bins. Taking away litter bins from public areas in the belief that people will take their litter home with them has proved a false hope. Authorities persist with the practice not because it shows any sign of succeeding but because it is economically convenient to pretend it might. Every country in the world that is notably tidy is also generous with the provision of litter bins. A tidy environment is a kind of pact between landowner and land user. Every local authority has the right to expect people not to drop litter, but it also has the duty to help them dispose of that litter in a convenient and responsible way. An authority that declines to provide and empty bins in public places is not holding up its end of the bargain. Although some people will drop litter anywhere, the overwhelming majority will look for and use a bin if it is provided. And the millions of us who pick up other people’s litter are much more inclined to do so if there is a nearby bin in which to put it.

With or without bins we need to make it easier to complain. At present if you are driving through countryside and you see a layby swimming in debris, it is nearly impossible to know where to lodge an objection. Every layby and car park should have a discreet notice saying something like: “This layby is the responsibility of South Whatnot Borough Council. If you find a problem here, give us a call at 0191 999.”

Persuading people to stop littering
Above all, we need to address the underlying problems that cause people to break the law in the first place. It is odd, in any sane society, that a person would choose to drive into the country and dump rubbish on a stranger’s land rather than take it for safe and legal disposal. According to a study by the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London, the challenges and costs of disposing of waste legally in many places are so great, and the risk of capture so slight, that many people feel impelled to fly-tip. “Overall,” the report concludes, “the picture painted is of a system which actually at times made it quite hard to behave honestly and legally.” Well, for crying out loud, let’s make it otherwise.

Persuading people to stop littering is not actually that hard. Other countries — Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada — have done it without fuss or huge expense. Encams’ own figures show that although over half of Britons drop litter sometimes (a depressing statistic, to be sure), the overwhelming majority do it secretly and guiltily. Most will not litter where there is no litter already (which is why there is usually little litter in national parks and other beauty spots). Those who did litter overwhelmingly said they did it because there were no bins available or because “everybody else was doing it.” Only about 10 per cent of litterers are truly incorrigible. Nearly all the rest are susceptible to being persuaded to be good.

I think it’s worth a shot, don’t you? All we want, after all, is to make Britain’s countryside what it was almost everywhere until very recently and what most of us still want it to be – a place of beauty, delight and sometimes utter perfection. We may not entirely succeed, but at least we’ll try. The real worry with litter, it seems to me, is not those who drop it, but the millions who look at it and do nothing.

If you would like to join the fight, then please write, email: billbryson@cpre.org.uk.