Communities should 'compete to be spotless': 30 million tonnes of litter collected from streets each year, says report

Litter is an eyesore for everyone, and figures show the ugliness has significantly increased in the last thirty years, along with a substantial list of associated problems.

It is illegal to drop litter under section 87 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and local authorities can issue fixed penalty fines of £80 for each offence or go to court and issue a fine of up to £2,500.

So far government initiatives have failed to stop the public dumping their leftovers, however, and 30 million tonnes of human waste are collected from our streets and disposed of by local authorities every year, according to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), at a cost to taxpayers of £500 million.

A new report called Litterbugs, backed by author Bill Bryson, president of CPRE, has criticised a 'lack of co-ordination' and 'disjointed' and inconsistent communication over imposing penalties, for councils' failed efforts to change public attitudes and the huge rise in litter since the 1960s.

'We must build civic pride in clean and tidy environments, with communities competing to be spotless," said Bryson. Only then can we stop the exasperating and routine vandalism of a country so rich in natural, cultural and built heritage.'

The report's authors criticised local authorities over fining and called for greater consistency.

Too few local authorities fine, and many fail to fine the worst offenders, such as young urban males, as wardens perceive them to be a threatening and dangerous, they said.

They also propose a series of measures for cracking down on litterers, including the creation of a national body to coordinate anti-littering campaigns and programmes, and the introduction of a New York style deposit scheme to cut down drive-by litter.

Ben Caldecott, head of Policy Exchange’s environment and energy unit, said: 'We know what works from abroad, where schemes have cut littering rates by up to 80 per cent.

He argued council clean-up costs could be cut massively if simple measure like providing more bins were put in place.

Over time, if we better educate people and stop the perception that litter is somehow 'someone else's problem', then we can get to the root causes of this blight on our towns and countryside,' he added.

The report called for more government action to take account of litter and littering behaviour in the design of Britain's public spaces, based on research that an intelligent approach to designing public spaces can reduce littering at no extra cost to taxpayers.

The report revealed stark national differences between UK councils in terms of litter performance. Inner city Haringey council ranked bottom, while rural West Dorset council topped the poll. Overall, urban areas were more likely to be targeted by litterers than the countryside.

The report is part of CPRE's Stop the Drop campaign, aimed at raising national awareness about the problems of littering.

Later this month it is supporting British Waterways' Towpath Tidy 2009, a series of locally coordinated activity days along targeted stretches of more than 2,000 miles of canals and rivers.

The background

In 1963, the annual cost throughout England & Wales stood at just £13 million.

The health risks of such a huge rise in rotting waste are potentially catastrophic. It is not surprising that litter is one of the main reasons Britain has a rat population of over 60 million, more than the number of humans currently living in the country.

No one is more than 10 metres from a rat at any one time, increasing the risk of catching Weil's disease from the animal's urine. Weil's can lead to kidney and liver failure and eventually death.

Drug-related litter is becoming more and more common too, and in worrying places. Councils remove most contaminated needles and drug related paraphernalia from parks, playing fields, and residential gardens.

Unsurprisingly now smokers have been banished to the streets outside workplaces, smoking rubbish tops the drop list, with 122 tonnes of cigarette butts and cigarette-related litter discarded every day across the UK.

Piles of half stubbed out cigarettes create their own lethal hazards. Defra links 40 per cent of outdoor fires each year to litter. Two of Britain's worst disasters were caused by cigarette litter dropped by smokers; the Bradford City football fire, which killed 40 people in 1985, and the King's Cross underground railway station fire in 1987, where 31 people died.

Smoking bins outside pubs and clubs attempt to get the worst offending group to correct their habits, but overfull and rarely emptied, the bins often catch alight and cause their own problems.

Recycling campaigners argue the biggest waste associated with much of the litter in our neighbourhoods is that it is a loss of a vital resource, since inevitably items that are removed - paper packaging, steel or aluminium cans, plastic bottles, glass bottles - could be recovered and re-used.

And research shows the public want to walk and drive along clean streets.

In England and Wales over 1.3 million items of litter are dropped on our roads every weekend, by pedestrians and drivers throwing it out their vehicle.

But over 90 per cent of road users finding it irritating and disgusting, and describe it as one of Britain's biggest driving annoyances.

As today's report, Litterbugs, by think tank Policy Exchange and the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) suggests, solving Britain's waste management could have more to do with a shortage of bins than a shortage of public support for attractive public spaces.

And it also stresses the need for a root and branch approach –along with the requisite political will - from local and central government to tackle not just an eyesore, but an expensive drain on already thinly stretched resources.