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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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.

Part of the much larger Woolmer Forest, it is like a lost corner of the New Forest, but to many minds is even more scenic thanks to its long views of the steep and comely hills known as the Hampshire Hangers. It is a miracle and joy that such a refuge of perfection survives just 50 miles from Trafalgar Square.

Until a few weeks ago the heath, the forest and vast tracts of land beyond were to be part of the new and long-awaited South Downs National Park. But in July the government inspector, Neil Parry, recommended that they be excluded on the odd grounds that they were not geologically appropriate and the even odder ones that they were not sufficiently lovely. At a stroke the proposed park has been cut by nearly a quarter, from 1,638 square kilometres to just 1,267.

“It’s astounding really,” Margaret Paren, a retired civil servant and CPRE stalwart, told me when I visited the area this week. We were standing by a lovely old barn at a place called Old Ditcham Farm, near Petersfield. “This is a perfect example of what’s happened,” she said. “The barn here has been taken out of the park, but the farmhouse is still in. The land on that side of the road is in, but on this side it’s out. No one in their right mind would suggest that the landscape on one side is worthier than the landscape on the other, but that is in fact what has happened.”

Why it has happened is a question that takes some answering. The South Downs National Park has existed as an idea for over 60 years. In 1947 it was one of 12 areas of England recommended for park status by Sir Arthur Hobhouse, and it was the only one of the original twelve not to gain that recognition in the years that followed. In 1956 it was considered for inclusion but the proposal was set aside on the lame (and, as time has shown, patently incorrect) grounds that it didn’t have adequate recreational prospects. Instead in 1962 it became two Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, designations designed to give all the protections of a national park but without the visitor centres and other touristy paraphernalia.

Finally in 1999, more than 50 years after it was first proposed, the park idea was resurrected. After the usual long period of consultations the boundaries were agreed, and hundreds of hardworking volunteers like Margaret Paren were set to celebrate the birth of England’s newest and in many ways most important national park. So it came as a shock when, in early July, the inspector announced that he wished the park to be much smaller than everyone had supposed it would be.

It is a decision that is truly hard to understand. I spent a long day this week being driven by CPRE members along the back roads of Hampshire and West Sussex, through a landscape of woods, sunken lanes, rolling hills and hidden farms, all of it glorious, all of it now outside the new national park boundaries.

“This would be London’s national park in effect – the one national park that could be reached easily from the city,” Shirley Wright of the West Sussex CPRE pointed out as we paused on a hill in the village of Elsted and took in a view that was ancient, expansive and fine. The Western Weald is not only lovely to behold and to be in, but miraculously unspoiled despite standing in some of the most developmentally attractive countryside on the planet. I can’t imagine that any landscape this uniformly serene and agreeable stands so close to a national capital anywhere else in the world.

Already the South Downs and Western Weald attract more than 40 million recreational visits a year – more than any existing national park. So it would seem logical, on visitor grounds alone, to make it as large as possible. In fact, the very opposite appears set to happen. The inspector wishes to confer park status only on the lofty uplands, which least need rigorous protection (IKEA is unlikely to want to build on a hilltop after all) and withhold it from the populous valleys, where developers would most like to plant their golf courses, executive estates and retail sheds.

The suspicion is that the government has taken fright at the cost of maintaining a national park in an area of prosperous, developmentally promising market towns like Petersfield, Midhurst and Petworth, but that isn’t what it is saying.

It is saying rather that the Western Weald should be excluded on the grounds that it is a landscape of a different character. The South Downs, the argument runs, are chalky uplands, while the more low-lying Weald is made up of older sandstones and clays, which give it an entirely different nature (a fact that, if really relevant, somebody perhaps ought to have noticed years ago). No one disputes the geology, but the logic is beyond fathoming. Most national parks incorporate more than one landscape type – the Peak District has three, the Lake District five – and most people would argue that variety is the essence of their glory. Anyway nothing in the designation guidelines suggests that uniformity of subsoil ought to be an inspector’s ambition.

But the real pain and worry come from the suggestion that the lands to be excluded have for the most part become irreversibly degraded. Here is a typical passage from the landscape assessor’s lengthy report:

I do not consider that Liss, Petersfield or Sheet meet the natural beauty criterion. I also find that the character of the surrounding landscape has been extensively fragmented by the transport infrastructure and urbanising influences. In my view, the character and quality of the ‘Mixed Farmland and Woodland’ landscape character type has been so degraded by the combined effects of settlements, road and rail links, that the tract no longer meets the natural beauty criterion.

And so it goes through many long and bewilderingly dismissive pages. Why -to take just one small point -a venerable railway line that was unexceptionable sixty years ago is now an intolerable scar on the landscape is a question that really could do with answering.

“The inconsistencies are almost comical,” Margaret Paren told me. “According to the assessor’s report, the A272 is noisy and intrusive where it passes through the Weald, but a lovely country lane when it reaches the Downs. They seem desperate to fit the facts to their case rather than the other way around.”

It’s little wonder that nearly everyone you meet believes the real motivation for shrinking the park is to save money.

“If that is so,” says Chris Todd, head of the South Downs Campaign, a coalition of more than 100 pro-park organisations, which includes the CPRE, “then that is really very disappointing because in the overall scheme of things the park budget is peanuts. The estimated cost of the park – that is, the larger park, with the Western Weald included – is £6 to £8 million a year. That compares with the £200 million to £300 million budget you have for a single local authority like Brighton & Hove.

“National parks are in fact tremendously good value. All of them together cost the British taxpayer £1 per person per year. And anyway the £6 to £8 million for the national park isn’t additional costs, but costs transferred from one budget to another. So cost grounds would be a very, very poor reason for creating a park that is smaller than it ought to be.”

A separate but very worrying danger is what all this means for the future of AONB’s. To argue that two of the largest and most important AONBs in the south of England have become critically degraded in 40 years doesn’t say much for government policy, does it? Even worse is the thought of a developer being able to say to a planning inspector: “Look, if it isn’t good enough to include in the national park, how can you claim it’s worth protecting now?”

Submissions from interested parties will be accepted till September 24, then Jonathan Shaw, the presiding minister, or Hillary Benn, the Secretary of State, must decide whether to accept the inspector’s report or to modify it. They won’t make a more important decision this year.

It would be wonderful to think that before taking such a decision, they will come out and do what I did – spend a day driving around looking at it. I can guarantee they will have a lovely day. They really ought to see it while it is still there.

© Bill Bryson
September 2007

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