It is not my deliberate intention to repeat a theme (although I am told by others as I get older that repetition and hesitation – but not, I should stress, deviation – are both qualities that I am developing in abundance). But I have just read a story which focuses on a rather different kind of citizen power from last month’s hero, Peter Silverman.

I would like to introduce you to the St Peter’s Neighbourhood Monitoring Group. They are, I read, a group of older ladies ranging in age from 67 to 92. And before jam, Jerusalem and other stereotypes spring to mind, I should make clear that these ladies live in the St Peter’s area of Leicester, an inner-city neighbourhood with a high level of social housing, four high-rise apartment blocks and blighted by all sorts of anti-social behaviour from litter to drug-dealing.

What this venerable group of ladies does, though, is ground-breaking. They have somehow (and with the help of 27-year-old David Lawson, the only male involved and, by my calculations, young enough to be the great-grandson of some of the group members) managed to set up sufficient surveillance equipment to be able to record some of the murkier goings on in St Peter’s. And that is all that they do – record and then publish online what they have recorded.

”What’s the good of that ?”, I hear you ask. Are they going to make a film ? Well, some of the footage has, apparently, been handed over to the police but there is no public record of how many prosecutions have resulted. But, and here speaks young David Lawson, “We know the fact that we’re doing it deters people. After we started filming, the incidence of littering nose-dived”.

But I am unbelievably disappointed to hear the comments from James Treadwell, a University of Leicester criminologist, about all this : “I call them vigilantes – they’re not tied by legal conventions, legal codes or due process. They’re acting as judge, jury and executioner. We consent to be policed by the state – these kind of groups we don’t consent to” Well, Mr Treadwell, I think that you’re exaggerating this slightly. They’re recording and publishing what happens in their area. If what they record and publish isn’t of a criminal nature, then there might be a question of invasion of privacy. But, assuming that they are fairly careful about what they record and publish, I don’t think that there’s an issue. Do criminals really “consent to be policed by the state” ? I don’t think so.

These ladies have given us an inspiring example of grabbing a problem that has a seriously detrimental effect on the quality of their lives and then determinedly pursuing the solution to that problem. They have shown us that there IS a way of dealing with antisocial behaviour if the conventional route doesn’t seem to be working. But there is another theme here that warms the cockles of my heart – and that is that they have a young lad helping them who is some 3 generations distant from some of them. Isn’t that, too, what life is all about ? Crossing the generational divide is what not nearly enough of us do these days – so hats off to you, too, young David Lawson.

Many of us, though fed up with the ever-present problem of litter, feel powerless to do anything about it. One option that has more popular in recent years has been the formation of an ever-growing number of local volunteer litter groups, started by ordinary people who have decided to channel their frustration into positive action. Not only do they clear the litter from their neighbourhoods but they are also instrumental in encouraging other residents to get involved and in making great efforts to change litterers’ behaviour.

But people’s feelings of helplessness are increased when the badly-littered area is out of reach. Typical examples of this include railway tracks and motorway verges. But the situation may not be as hopeless as you think.

In the news recently there has been publicity given to a valiant knight in shining armour by the name of Peter Silverman. Fed up with the appalling state of the verges on the M40, he resorted to the corporate equivalent of a citizen’s arrest – the little-known device of the Litter Abatement Order. This involves a citizen taking a “responsible body” (in this case, the Highways Agency) to court to force them to carry out their statutory duty to keep free of litter the land for which they are responsible. Peter Silverman was successful in his tilt against this particular windmill and he even managed to secure reimbursement of the costs that he had incurred.

But, as Tom Sutcliffe subsequently pointed out in the Telegraph, the real culprits in this case, “fly-tippers and oafish motorists”, remain out of reach. Sutcliffe went on to single out the people who leave leaflets tucked under your car’s windscreen wipers and to muse about whether that constituted litter or whether, to qualify as litter, it had to hit the ground first.

In fact this irritating activity is not covered by current litter or fly-posting law and Tom Sutcliffe is right – these leaflets become litter only when they reach the ground. The irony was, though, that Google’s ingenious advertising system had gleefully lit upon the word “leaflet” in the heading of Tom Sutcliffe’s article on the Telegraph website and helpfully listed, alongside Sutcliffe’s article, various businesses that professed to be happy to print your leaflets for you. The Law of Unintended Consequences is alive and well……

So, Caroline Spelman – when you and your Defra ministers get to reconsidering the litter laws (including, I hope, making it possible to prosecute the registered owner of a car from which litter is thrown – at the moment only the person who actually threw the litter can be prosecuted and so that entails a fairly demanding identification requirement) please take the time to deal explicitly with leaflets left under windscreen wipers. And, while you’re at it, please also give Litter Abatement Orders a much greater level of publicity and make them more accessible to the public to use. That way, in line with your “Big Society” aspirations, you will be better equipping the citizen army with another effective item of weaponry against the ever-present litter menace.

For some time I have regularly been asked : “why can’t unemployed people be made to pick up litter ?”.

Well – it now looks a bit more likely that this might happen. In his speech last Thursday, Iain Duncan Smith (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) set out his broad plans for improving the welfare system so that the unemployed are given greater incentives to get into work and so that the whole system is made fairer.

Although he didn’t specifically mention that “the unemployed will be forced to do menial jobs such as picking up litter and cleaning graffiti in exchange for dole cash” as the Mirror had expected the day before, the feeling seems to be that this is one of the options being considered by the government. To my mind, there are various aspects of this idea that need careful thought.

First of all, as someone who fervently believes that picking up litter and keeping our neighbourhoods clean and tidy is not only the responsibility of all of us but also an activity that can have an extremely positive affect on our communities and on the relationships of the people who live in them, I am concerned that such enforced activity by people on benefits sends out the wrong message. It could be interpreted as saying that it doesn’t matter if your neighbourhood is a tip – we’ll send in the chain gang to clean it up for you – and we’ll do it again when you’ve mucked it up again.

Second, I am always concerned that forcing people to clear up an area is seen as a punishment and so stigmatises the act of picking up litter. For this reason, some people are concerned over the use of Community Payback teams (formerly “Community Service”) to clean up litter and graffiti. I have, on more than one occasion, been asked when I have been out litter-picking if I was “on Community Service”. When huge numbers of ordinary citizens are happy to spend time cleaning up their area, presenting litter-picking as an undesirable activity isn’t the first thing that we want to hear. And why is it always litter-picking that is mentioned as the stereotypical activity for unemployed people ? Why not pay them also to visit lonely people, do gardening for those who are unable to do it themselves or go shopping for the house-bound ?

There are various other issues often raised in connection with anyone (be it a team of offenders or a team of unemployed people) engaged in litter-picking – not least that they must be careful not to be doing work that is the preserve of the local council (or they could ironically, be doing someone else out of a job).

But, overall, I think that there is a key requirement to Mr Duncan Smith’s potential plans for the unemployed to pick up litter that would make the idea a whole lot more socially acceptable and, also, more socially effective. I strongly suggest that, if litter-picking really is an activity that Mr Duncan Smith and his team have in mind for the unemployed, then make it so that they pick up litter in the company of and under the guidance of local volunteers.

The advantages of this are many. First, they will be carrying out a normal activity in a normal social setting, with other ordinary citizens who are doing it for love and certainly not for money. This will not only make the unemployed people feel a lot more positive about the task but they will also benefit from some constructive social interaction as a result (which, in my view, is one of the strong arguments for letting Community Payback teams operate in conjunction with volunteer litter-pickers, something that is already done successfully in some areas of the country). Also, litter-picking may well be something that unemployed people will continue to do when, one hopes, they are successfully back in work. In other words, the activity will be a strong inducement to behaviour change and will help to ensure that the “don’t litter” message spreads faster and deeper in our society.

So, Mr Duncan Smith and your team – please consider carefully how this type of scheme will operate. There are great opportunities to be taken and huge gains to be made if you configure this concept creatively and with society’s wider needs in mind.

I would like to tell you about an article written recently in the Financial Times by columnist Michael Skapinker. What he said struck a loud chord with me and I hope that it will with you too.

It’s all about what you would do if you saw someone dropping litter. Michael Skapinker quotes Prince Charles, when asked what he would do if he saw someone littering, as saying : “the difficult thing is to ask them to pick it up without getting stabbed”.

Michael Skapinker then goes on to relate the heroic episode where Boris Johnson, on his bicycle, pursued a car from which a piece of litter had been thrown at his helmet. He caught up with the offending youths and confronted them.

Of course, the issue here is about changing litterers’ behaviour and preventing an area from declining. It has been amply shown that, as Skapinker puts it, when louts get away with dropping litter they realise they can get away with more and it could be a more serious offence next time. This then, Broken Windows-style, leads to people fearing for their safety and going out less often and results in the decline of the neighbourhood.

The key point is that Michael Skapinker goes on to suggest a way in which you can challenge litterbugs so that there is a chance of changing their behaviour but of not risking one’s personal security in doing so. His solution is to take a lead from the Grand Master of the litter world, Bill Bryson. Bill relates how he challenged a litter lout by saying : “this is a beautiful place – why don’t we keep it that way ?”, at which the teenager cleared up his mess.

But Michael Skapinker has cannily modified this approach so as to soften the confrontation and avoid the chance of a Mexican stand-off – or worse. Skapinker relates how he quoted the Bryson formula to a young litterer who had chucked his paper cup into the undergrowth but, on seeing that the youth “sat mute”, Skapinker “scrambled through the bushes, retrieved the cup and walked off with it”. This elicited a softly-spoken “sorry” from the youth.

I hope that this is a formula that we can all try. If you have tried it, please leave a comment on this blog to let us know the outcome and do also e-mail michael.skapinker@ft.com so that he can see evidence as to the effectiveness (or otherwise) of his suggestion.

Earlier in March, Keep Britain Tidy launched “This Is Our Home”, its “manifesto for a cleaner England”.

Now, you may wonder, what on earth is Keep Britain Tidy doing issuing a manifesto. It may be nearing election time, but Keep Britain Tidy isn’t a political party, is it ? No – it isn’t, but the document is an important statement of the value to us all of the areas we live in and it is no coincidence that it was launched just weeks before a general election campaign is due to start.

But why “manifesto” ? Well, if you think about the origin of the word, it combines the meanings of “hand” (the “mani” bit) and “hit” (the “festo” bit, related to our word “fend”). So the meaning of “manifesto” is something which is so blindingly obvious (or “manifest”) that it hits you on the hand.

And that is exactly what Keep Britain Tidy’s manifesto does – it makes a point that should be blindingly obvious to us all but which, amid the turmoil of our modern world, unfortunately needs making again and again.

What Keep Britain Tidy is suggesting is that we will achieve a significantly cleaner England only if we commit to the following 3 things :

• inspirational and decisive leadership

• partnership with a shared vision and clear goals

• building personal responsibility

By leadership, Keep Britain means not only that the new government (of whichever colour) must come up with a fresh approach to tackling litter and other environmental quality issues but that local authorities too must take the lead. But it doesn’t stop there. “Land managers”, those bodies responsible for managing and keeping clean the land in the public realm such as roads and railways, waterways, housing estates, farms, forests and shopping centres – must all step forward and do their bit. And, finally, manufacturers and retailers must seriously take the lead in designing as much packaging as possible out of products.

As for partnership, Keep Britain Tidy is quite right to say that we all need to work together to achieve this. It’s no use keeping the blinkers on and saying “our responsibility stops just there – thereafter it’s YOUR responsibility”. The manifesto gives the example of local authorities and Primary Care Trusts working together creatively to ensure that local areas are attractive enough for people to want to take exercise in them.

And, finally, personal responsibility. This is, in many ways, the most challenging of Keep Britain Tidy’s suggestions. This is about encouraging behaviour change in ordinary people so that, rather than dropping their litter on the ground for someone else to pick up, they make the transition to taking their rubbish home with them. We need to make it easy for people to do the right thing and so we need to ensure that there are enough litter bins in the right places and that they are emptied often enough. But, when all is said and done, we need to change people’s behaviour so that they don’t drop litter in the first place.

Keep Britain Tidy concludes that “We can only succeed together”. And that, I suggest, is the key point here. We have moved beyond the point where it is a question of blaming the government, or any other body, for the fact that the people of England drop enough litter each year to cause around £780 million pounds to have to be spent annually on clearing it up. This is an issue that should concern all of us and, more to the point, that every single one of us has the capability of helping to put right. So let’s all do our bit, whether by being a campaigner or an active member of a volunteer litter group. “This is our home”, as Keep Britain Tidy says – most of us wouldn’t keep trashing our own home, so let’s show people how wrong it is to keep trashing our country.

You may have read about the Duke of Edinburgh’s publicly-observed act of litter-picking when he was at Sandringham recently. After attending church on Sunday morning he chatted to the waiting crowds as usual and was then spotted picking up a discarded paper coffee cup and its plastic lid that were lying in the grass.

As you do, I am sure, I applaud the Duke’s action. It no doubt sets a good example to see “the first gentleman of the land” (as one onlooker described him) doing his civic duty and helping to keep his community clean. And I am delighted that the incident was widely reported as it does indeed show that it is not beneath a member of the royal family to pick up litter. If it’s OK for them to pick up litter, then it’s surely OK for the rest of us to pick up litter.

What I do find ironic, though, is that we need to shine such a spotlight on behaviour like this that should be second nature in all of us. It is an indication of how far we still have to go in changing the ingrained habits and social norms of our society that such a seemingly mundane act was afforded such widespread press coverage.

One journalist’s observation underlined just how surprised some people were that the Duke had done something such as pick up a piece of litter. “Some spectators gasped”, the journalist wrote, “when they saw him suddenly lurch forward and feared that he was about to take a fall. But it soon became clear that the still-sprightly royal was determined to do his bit to Keep Britain Tidy by picking up the cup”.

A member of the crowd was quoted as saying : “I admire him for picking up litter. And he wasn’t wearing gloves. You never know where these things have been”. This highlights another ingrained attitude that we need to challenge – for sure you ought to wear gloves when you are picking up litter and you ought to use a litter-picking stick but, for heaven’s sake, you aren’t going to catch the Black Death from picking up a discarded coffee cup.

So, good on you, Prince Philip. You’ve done the anti-litter message a world of good by your simple, natural reaction to seeing a littered coffee cup blight your landscape. But let’s all hope that one day people’s reaction to hearing a story like this will be more along the lines of “so what ? that’s what we would all do”.

I’ve just come back from Cornwall where we have been holding CleanupUK’s Dirty Week-end, a conference on Thursday and Friday involving some of our friends and supporters. The aim of the Dirty Week-end was to provide an update on the national litter situation, to look at how volunteers can help to change litterers’ behaviour and to ask everyone’s views on CleanupUK’s future plans.

It was a fascinating exchange of ideas. We heard from speakers from Defra (the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), the University of Southampton, the Social Market Foundation (an independent think tank), Keep Britain Tidy, CPRE (the Campaign to Protect Rural England) and Cornwall Council. All of them had important things to say about how we can tackle the problem if litter and why it is so vital that we do so.

One of the highlights was a presentation by Roger from the North Hill Community Litter Project, based at North Hill near Launceston in Cornwall. Have a look at their website at www.litterfree.co.uk.

Roger explained that the North Hill group focus on the 3 Ps : picking, prevention and partners. What I found so admirable about this approach is that North Hill aren’t content with just picking up litter – they have given serious thought to how they can make a real difference to the behaviour of people who drop litter.

Their method is to make sure that everyone knows when an area has been litter-picked by the volunteers by putting up signs to tell them this; in addition, they make sure through their parish newsletter and by word of mouth that all the community knows what the group is doing and that as many people as possible are involved; crucially, they forge partnerships with key elements of their community and ask them to spread the message too (have a look at the list of partners on their website); and, finally, they communicate their message to local schools so that the young are aware of and understand the problems that litter causes.

The North Hill group, and indeed all those who joined us for our conference in Cornwall, reminded me very much of one of the first blogs that I wrote : “In praise of volunteers” in April 2008. I came away from our Dirty Week-end with the strong reassurance that volunteers and other people who devote their energies to solving our country’s litter problem (whether they are based in government departments, universities, local authorities, think tanks or voluntary organisations) are as passionate as ever in their determination to make a difference.

This is indeed good news. It means that litterers may run but they can’t hide. The hope is as strong as ever for the result that so many of us, including the North Hill group, strive for – to make our country litter-free.

I am delighted to see that Keep Britain Tidy have issued some Christmas tips this year on how best to avoid the particular festive opportunities to litter or fly-tip.

But when you think about it, why should different circumstances prevail at Christmas as far as littering is concerned ? You might even think that, as most of us are going to be spending more time at home over Christmas than we do during the rest of the year (even if this is a situation forced upon some people courtesy of a looming British Airways strike), there is less chance that we will be out there littering the usual public spaces.

Keep Britain Tidy are suggesting that, among other things, we take care over Christmas with the following 3 issues :

First, we should be careful to dispose of our Christmas trees properly (the real ones, that is – whether to buy a real or an artificial tree opens up a whole new vista of debate…..). So many Christmas trees are fly-tipped each year and, like littered tissues, they do indeed biodegrade but it takes a lot longer for them to do so than we might think. Most, if not all, local councils have facilities for the shredding and composting of Christmas trees, so if you’ve gone to the trouble of going out and buying a tree and driving home with it, please also make the effort at the end of the tree’s useful life of taking it to the council tip (sorry, “Recycling Centre”). We can, of course, think of all sorts of reasons why we shouldn’t do this, not least because of all those needles that tend to find their way into every nook and cranny of our cars – and sometimes of us too. So do either tie the used tree to your car roof or cut it up into manageable pieces and put the branches into bin bags for transportation.

The second suggestion from Keep Britain Tidy relates to cigarette ends (and no jokes about Santa putting his butt down the chimney, please). We are still a nation with a high percentage of smokers – and social events tend to lead to the accumulation of cigarette butts. So Keep Britain Tidy suggest using portable ashtrays so that the smokers don’t carpet your lawn with fag ends. I’d also extend that point to pubs and offices and, particularly, office parties. When you’ve had a few drinks, your awareness levels tend to drop and so if there isn’t a handy receptacle for your butt ends, they are much more likely to end up on the ground.

The third Keep Britain Tidy point is about fast food. It is a natural biological reaction, when you’ve been out on the razzle, to develop a craving for some nice greasy food to fill your tummy. Hence the roaring fast food trade in the late night hours. Keep Britain Tidy beseech us all to remember, despite the seasonally merry state that we’re in, that we must pop our fast food packaging and remnants into a litter bin. Apart from anything else, we risk incurring a fine of £75 or so if we are spotted littering. And piles of fast food packaging blowing round town are hardly attractive – except to the rat population. I also beseech councils to empty litter bins assiduously over the festive season to avoid anyone coming up with the biblical excuse that “there was no room at the bin”…….

Actually, I think that there are two other aspects worthy of mention in the context of Christmas littering.

I heard Chris Rea being interviewed on the radio this morning – it was being suggested that his perennial love-it-or-hate-it song “Driving Home for Christmas” (I must confess that I love it) qualifies for the label “Christmas carol”. It immediately brought to mind the increase of traffic on the roads at Christmas and, as surely as Easter follows Christmas, the occurrence of plenty of littering from vehicles on the verges and hard shoulders of our road system.

And, finally, what about all that wrapping paper ? It may not actually litter anywhere other than the sitting room floor, but can we not find an alternative method of presenting our presents ? It sometimes seems like the wrapping paper creates a larger volume of waste than the presents themselves would constitute. So, all you creative people out there – please leave some comments here with a few ingenious ideas for a “Christmas unwrapped” campaign.

After all, the Three Wise Men brought the baby Jesus his birthday gifts in containers that were clearly re-usable. Perhaps those Wise Men were wiser (and greener) than we have ever given them credit for.

A clean and cheerful Christmas to you all !

How many of us remember feeding the ducks by a river or in the park when we were little ? I remember it as something that everyone did and you took it for granted that it was OK to do so. I am reminded by my mother that, on one of our visits to see my grandmother in my early days, we were feeding the birds in Poole Park and, in the process, I was bitten by a swan. I’m glad to say that I can’t remember that. But it was all a great way to learn about wildlife.

It’s interesting how much the wiser we all are nowadays. The experts point out that feeding bread to ducks isn’t giving them the nutritional value that they need – it fills them up and calls upon their digestive juices without doing them any good. In fact the RSPB recommends that we feed other types of food to ducks : porridge oats, cake crumbs (because of the sugar content) and potatoes, not to mention rice and scraps of pastry. That way the birds will receive the nutrients that they need to grow successfully into adulthood.

“Has George gone off the rails ?”, you may be asking yourself. “Or have I mistakenly tuned into a natural history website ?” Don’t worry – this is all leading, as usual, to a litterary point.

That point is that a woman has recently been fined £75 for feeding the ducks with her little boy in Smethwick Hall Park in the West Midlands. “Oh, no!”, I hear you exclaim. “Not another case of petty officialdom going fine-crazy” – like the fines issued to the lady in Hull whose child dropped a half-eaten sausage roll or to the man in Ayr who dropped a £10 note.

Well – make your own mind up. The lady was fined because, it seems, there had been complaints about children slipping on the duck mess. But there were no signs up prohibiting feeding of the ducks, apparently. What is more, the warden who issued the fine said that the lady’s 17-month-old son could continue throwing bread as he was too young to prosecute.

You can see the council’s point of view – too many ducks or Canada geese in the wrong place can be a problem – not only from the duck poo point of view. Canada geese, in particular, can be quite intimidating (boy bitten by swan talking here) and encouraging their population to grow unnaturally large isn’t necessarily a good idea.

But even Chris Packham, Kate Humble’s erudite new co-presenter on Autumn Watch, thinks that feeding ducks is an important childhood experience.

So let’s by all means put up discreet signs in places where we don’t want anyone feeding the ducks but do let’s try to avoid what many see as the unreasonable dishing out of fines when a quiet word is all that is required.

I read a news story the other day that made me think about the types of litter that fall from the sky. My immediate thoughts turned to meteorites (perhaps more detritus than litter), odd bits of spacecraft (particularly in Russia where, traditionally, returning cosmonauts have ejected from their spacecraft and parachuted to earth) and, of course, fireworks – see how many spent rockets you encounter on your travels over the next week or so.

This issue also led me, at last, to find out the answer to a question that has lurked in my subconscious for ages – what happens to the contents when you flush the loo on an aeroplane ? Well, I am pleased to say that whatever you flush ends up in a holding tank on the plane and is emptied when the plane lands. What a relief ! And in some contrast to what happens still on many trains in this country – the loo empties its contents onto the track, hence the plea not to flush while the train is stopped at a station. So, spare a thought for the guys working on the railway tracks – not a fragrant job on occasions, you would imagine.

Anyway, what started all this off in my mind ? Well, it was a story from the Shanghai Daily telling of the problems caused by people littering from high-rise apartment blocks. Think about it – you’re way up off the ground and you’re extremely unlikely to get caught littering from such altitude. The temptation to chuck stuff out of the window is huge.

But a certain Mr Yu placed a notice in his apartment block accusing his higher-altitude neighbours of throwing used condoms onto his balcony. Mr Yu went so far as to nail the offending condoms onto the community notice board – yuck ! His comment was priceless : “I have never had such a disgusting ‘windfall’”, he complained.

We may giggle at this, but littering from a high-rise flat is no laughing matter and is, I think, in many ways similar to littering from a vehicle. Being at altitude or being cocooned in a vehicle causes people to alter their moral standards, not least because they are unlikely to get caught. The property management officials in Shanghai had remarked : “We have staff closely monitoring high-rise windows” to which our reaction is probably “yeah, right….”.

But there is a very serious side to this issue. It’s that littering in general is rightly considered to be a selfish, thoughtless, anti-social act. But, most of the time, it doesn’t directly cause physical harm. However, transfer such behaviour to a place at altitude and you create quite a different situation. There have been at least three such instances in the UK in recent times : a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush where, similar to the Shanghai episode, all sorts of rubbish (including “used condoms and other delights”) was being thrown out of the upper storeys and defiled the garden below; a fridge-freezer and, in separate incidents, the headboard of a bed, a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner and a sink were thrown from tower blocks in Glasgow – all luckily avoided hitting anyone; and finally, perhaps seemingly innocuous compared with the previously-mentioned objects, a full black bin-liner was chucked off a high-rise balcony at a tower block in London – it landed on a pram in the garden below and killed the baby in it. What a tragic result of completely thoughtless and entirely unnecessary behaviour.