The President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) [1], author Bill Bryson, launched Stop the Drop, the charity’s major campaign against the growing blight of litter and fly-tipping in England’s countryside.

Stop the Drop will highlight the impact litter and fly-tipping has across England, and give people the campaigning tools to demand action. The charity is also lobbying for a new bottle deposit law.

‘Litter is becoming the default condition of the countryside,’ said Bryson ‘It is time that we – all of us – did something about this. The landscape is too lovely to trash. That is why CPRE is launching Stop the Drop, to make the countryside what it was almost everywhere until very recently, and what most of us still want it to be – a place of cherished beauty and sometimes utter perfection.

The worsening nature of the litter problem is highlighted by the recent annual survey [2] of local authorities by the Government’s own litter watchdog, Encams. [3] Despite the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act (2005), which gives local authorities and others new powers to clean up litter, the survey shows the headline statistic on local authority performance has dropped from ‘satisfactory’ to ‘unsatisfactory’. Not one local authority was rated ‘good’. Litter and fly-tipping are a major and growing problem across England, in both rural and urban areas.

In the UK, an estimated 25 million tonnes of litter is dropped each year. And the problem is now five times worse than it was in the 1960s. [4] Statistics around fly-tipping are just as shocking: local authorities dealt with 2.6 million incidents in England in 2006-07 – up 5 per cent on the previous year. [5] However, only 1,700 people were successfully prosecuted for fly-tipping in that period, while taxpayers footed a clean-up bill of £73 million.

Bill Bryson said: ‘The bodies responsible for cleaning up litter and fly-tipping admit it is getting worse and many local authorities remain magnificently relaxed when it comes to doing anything about it. The total sum of fines for littering collected nationally last year was just slightly over £1.5 million, or about one-fifteenth of what the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea collects annually in parking fines.

‘Of the 43,624 fines levied, only 26,818 were actually paid, resulting in considerable loss of revenue. And 72 out of 354 local authorities issued no penalties at all. Littering is not a crime that has anyone quaking for fear of the consequences, because by and large there are no consequences.

‘None of us need stand idly by as our towns and countryside are trashed. Of course it is vital that people do not drop litter in the first place, but local authorities, central Government and other public bodies have a duty to clear it up and should all give a much stronger lead on the problem. We can all put pressure on them to do so.’

Support CPRE’s Stop the Drop campaign by visiting the website – www.cpre.org.uk, and doing the following:

• Take action: lobby your local authority, and ask them what they are doing to clean up litter and fly-tipping in your area. Local authorities and other bodies have a duty to clean up litter within a specified period, but the figures show that 107 of 174 local authorities surveyed (61.5%) were rated ‘unsatisfactory’ or ‘poor’ on overall levels of litter. Not one was rated as ‘good’, and even those with a ‘satisfactory’ rating need to do more to clean up litter; [6]

• Get involved: Join the online community www.litteraction.org.uk [7] – helping individuals and local groups organise clean-up drives and awareness raising activities in their local area;

• Get informed: sign up to support the campaign, receive Bill Bryson’s e-bulletins, with information and campaigning updates

CPRE will be lobbying the Government for more leadership to tackle litter and fly-tipping. The announcement in the recent Budget that supermarkets may have to charge to issue single-use plastic bags was a step in the right direction. CPRE now wants to see action to introduce a nationwide deposit system for drinks containers similar to that in many other countries. [8] Such a system would reward the public for returning used drinks containers, boost recycling and reduce litter.

Each household disposes of 500 plastic bottles a year (a total of 13 billion in the UK), but just 130 of these are recycled, meaning that 370 go to landfill, or into our streets, fields and hedgerows. A 10p deposit system on plastic bottles alone could therefore earn an average family £50 a year – just for returning their waste – while contributing to a cleaner environment.

Bill Bryson concluded: ‘If you are bothered by a single piece of litter, or you’re fed up with the blight of fly-tipping, or you’re driven to distraction by the fact that litter costs a whopping £600 million and more a year to clear up, this is the campaign for you. Please join us as we fight to Stop the Drop.’

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NOTES FOR EDITORS

1. CPRE, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, is a charity which promotes the beauty, tranquillity and diversity of rural England. We advocate positive solutions for the long-term future of the countryside. Founded in 1926, we have 60,000 supporters and a branch in every county. Patron: Her Majesty The Queen. www.cpre.org.uk

2. The 2006/07 Local Environmental Quality Survey of England data examined 19,000 sites across a sample of Local Authorities across all nine regions. ENCAMS (see Editor’s note 5) undertakes this research in order to provide Defra with relevant and reliable information on the state of the local environment. A summary of the litter statistics for the sample, which gives data for a wide range of local authorities, can be downloaded from www.cpre.org.uk. The full report can be downloaded from www.encams.org/uploads/publications/LEQSE_Year_6_Report.pdf

3. ENCAMS is an environmental charity and an ‘arms length’ body of Defra that runs the Keep Britain Tidy campaign. It receives approximately £5 million in core funding a year from Defra. Further information on ENCAMS can be found at www.encams.org.uk

4. Data from the Highways Agency – http://www.highways.gov.uk/knowledge/12043.aspx

5. ENCAMS defines litter as ‘waste in the wrong place caused by human agency’. Litter can be as small as a sweet wrapper or cigarette butt, as large as a bag of rubbish, or it can mean lots of items scattered about. Fly-tipping is the term used to describe waste illegally deposited on land – it could be from a single bin bag upwards to thousands of tonnes of construction and demolition waste, and it also includes the items of furniture, electrical goods etc that are scattered along too many roads and areas of countryside.

6. Detailed data on local authorities’ performance on litter, drawn from the Local Environmental Quality Survey of England 2006/07, is available through CPRE’s media centre.

7. CPRE and CleanupUK are charities dedicated to supporting the work of volunteer litter collecting groups around the UK, and are working together in www.litteraction.org.uk. This website links together volunteer groups and individuals across England, enabling them to work together to tackle problems of litter locally, and giving them support with best practice, guidance and links to campaigning advice.

8. Deposit schemes encourage consumers to return used drinks containers by repaying them a proportion of the cost of the drink (the deposit) if they do so. Deposit schemes have worked in other countries, e.g. in Australia (South Australia, where the scheme achieves a return rate of 74% for plastic bottles and 86-92% for cans), Germany, Denmark and Sweden (achieving an 86% return rate overall for drinks containers). In Bill Bryson’s home country of the US, there are ‘Bottle Bills’ in place in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Vermont.