CPRE President’s view

Dear Dropper-Stoppers,

Just a swift, but very sincere note to thank all of you who have supported the launch of the Stop the Drop campaign. Your words of advice and encouragement are more valued than you can imagine.

Please keep writing - and please don’t stop writing to your local and county councils, MPs and others who could be doing more to help us solve the problem of litter. Letters of complaint count for a lot, especially when there are a lot of them to count.

I would be very pleased to hear from you if you have got examples (and pictures too) of litter blight in places where it really, really shouldn’t happen - in beauty spots, school grounds, supermarket car parks and other places where somebody should be taking responsibility for it and isn’t. If you have complained to someone in authority about litter and received no response or an unhelpful answer, let us know. We’re collecting data!

Finally may I add personal congratulations to Brighter Wymondham Group in Norfolk for a heroically successful litter pick last week. More than 130 volunteers collected over three quarters of a tonne of litter. I am sorry I wasn’t able to join them, but I had a prior commitment at the other end of the country.

Thanks again and keep litter picking!

Bill Bryson

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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.

Continue reading ‘Clean up Britain: Bill Bryson and the war on litter’