Ben Stafford: Let's banish the litter that blights Britain

I suspect none of us can articulate our feelings about spring with

quite such romance as Wordsworth, but we feel uplifted by it

nonetheless. So I am sorry to bring you back down to earth by observing that, if you do venture out into your nearest bit of countryside this weekend, you are every bit as likely to see crisp bags and cigarette packets fluttering and dancing in the breeze as daffodils.

The British countryside is a mess in too many places. Whether it's plastic bags tangled in the branches of trees (witches' knickers, as I understand they're known), dumped sofas and televisions tumbling down

otherwise pristine hillsides or simply the sense that many of our roadsides have become linear rubbish dumps, litter – sometimes carelessly discarded but too often deliberately deposited – seems to be everywhere we look.

As an organisation campaigning for a beautiful and living countryside, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) is exasperated and angry about the actions of a relatively small number of thoughtless people that diminish the pleasure of so many.

So two years ago, we launched our Stop the Drop campaign to raise awareness of the problems of litter and fly-tipping in the countryside, and to try to reduce them. We have been fortunate to be led in this campaign by our tireless president, author Bill Bryson, who has taken to the airwaves, trod the corridors of power and joined groups picking up litter, all to highlight the scale and unacceptability of the problem.

A few statistics – not too many, I promise – illustrate what we face. An estimated 30 million tonnes of litter are collected from our roads each year and, in England in 2008-09, we spent 780m on street cleansing. That's 2.1m a day, a necessary payment in the battle against the rising tide of rubbish but, I suspect you would agree, not how our money should have to be spent at a time when councils are being asked to tighten their belts and cut services. It is thought that cleaning up fly-tipping on private land costs an additional 50m each year, and in 2008-09 councils dealt with 1.2 million incidences of fly-tipping.

So what can we do?

Of course, most people don't drop litter, but some do, whether out of thoughtlessness, laziness or plain awkwardness. We need them to stop, and we must also remind people that dropping litter is an antisocial and criminal activity. This could be done through advertising and awareness-raising campaigns involving government, local councils, Keep Britain Tidy and some of the big companies whose products are often littered. We took part in a meeting just last week at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in London to discuss how this might happen.

Anticipating those of you asking, "why do people need to be told that it's wrong to drop litter?", I sympathise with the question, but the evidence is that well-targeted and high profile behaviour change campaigns can make a difference.

We all instinctively fasten our car seatbelts, and most of us don't drink and drive, but strong and consistent advertising campaigns helped make this good behaviour the norm. We think it could work with litter too – is it entirely coincidental that litter has got worse in a period when the profile of anti-litter campaigning has fallen?

We can make it easier for people to do the right thing by providing

enough bins in the right locations, and CPRE is also calling for the

introduction of a deposit scheme to reward people for returning drinks containers; similar schemes have cut the amount of drink-related litter in other countries. And if you're feeling community-spirited, why not get your own hands dirty – over 300 volunteer groups have signed up to our www.litteraction.org.uk website, and picked up more than 36,000 bags of litter, actively making their communities cleaner, better

places.

But alongside the carrot is the stick. The laws to tackle litter, and to fine those who drop it and who fly-tip, are pretty good. But they need to be better enforced. There is too much variation in the priority councils give to litter – some hand out large numbers of penalties, some none at all. Punishment for littering should not be a first resort, but it should be used when necessary.

Our countryside is breathtaking, never more so than at this time of year when it pulses with life and the anticipation of summer. But, litter-free, it would be even better. As our president Bill Bryson says: "No one wants to live in a country that's only beautiful from the ankles up."