Let’s put things into slightly sharper focus first. The £885 million is spent by around 330 local authorities, so that averages out at about £2.7 million per local authority a year to clean streets and minor roads. So, to pose my question in a different way – the equivalent of how many local councils’ street cleaning costs does cleaning up England’s motorways and trunk roads constitute ?

And there’s another factor to consider before you guess the cost – the fact that cleaning the verges of motorways and trunk roads is a completely different challenge from cleaning streets – you need to take considerable safety precautions, sometimes even involving coning off the inside (or outside) lane and almost always necessitating the presence of a safety vehicle edging along between the men doing the litter-picking and the traffic coming up behind them. That doesn’t come cheap.

Well, let me put you out of your suspense ! The annual figure quoted earlier this month by Mike Penning (Transport Minister) was £20 million – £10 million to clear motorway verges of litter and £10 million to clear trunk roads. So that is but 2.25% of the total that councils spend annually on street cleaning and equivalent to the average spend of 7-8 local councils.

What do you think about all this ? Well, I think that something is wrong and out of kilter here. Sure, we mustn’t forget that it’s members of the general public who are chucking the rubbish out of their cars when they drive up and down motorways and trunk roads. But that is no excuse for not making a good attempt to keep these places clean.

My over-riding feeling when I read the figures announced by Mr Penning was : “WHAT ? Only £20 million ??”. And so my conclusion is that, given the very public nature of our motorways and trunk roads and the hugely negative impact that their littered verges cause, somehow we ought to reallocate some of the budget that is currently given to local councils and pass it over to the Highways Agency to use on motorways and trunk roads. Or, perhaps a more practical suggestion, extend local councils’ responsibilities to include cleaning the motorways and trunk roads that run through their area. That way, there would be no lack of clarity in the public’s mind over whose responsibility it is to clean up a particular stretch of road (as there so frequently is now) and I feel sure that we would end up with a cleaner motorway and trunk road system at the end of it all.

Litter has seen a slight improvement, with 1% more sites than last year judged to be of an acceptable standard for litter. 15% of sites surveyed were judged unsatisfactory for litter in 2010/2011.

This is a wide-ranging survey carried out by a specialist team of trained Keep Britain Tidy survey officers. A robust quality assurance process ensures consistent surveying and high-quality data. The survey is made up of a structured sample of England, covering a range of types of local authorities across a range of the scale of deprivation. The survey is also split to ensure it covers an even spread of ten different defined land uses. This ensures that issues related to particular types of land can be identified. Please follow this link if you would like to see the full report.

Regionally, the North West is still narrowly the worst region for litter, although it showed an improvement of 3 percentage points over 2009/2011. London, the West Midlands and the East of England were one percentage point better for litter than the North West and the East of England showed the greatest decline (3 percentage points) over the year out of all the regions. The South East and North East came top of the litter table, earning the joint accolade of least littered regions.

What does this tell us ? Well, it tells us that, on average, the nation is about as littered as it was last year (and, in fact, about the same as for the last few years). You may find that hard to believe if you live in a badly-littered area, but the statistics are telling us that, on average, litter is not getting worse. So – we’ve still got work to do, by the sound of it !

And do let us know how you feel about these figures and if they accord with your own perceptions.

So when a new and creative response to littering from vehicles appears, l think that we should all take notice.

The case in question comes from Aiken County in South Carolina and involved an unknown local resident bagging up the litter chucked out onto the verge and hanging it from the roadside trees. It created a remarkable sight – do click on this link to see the photo. The suspended litter was accompanied by a sign that read “Stop throwing out trash”.

I think that this was a great idea, but before we all get out there and start hanging litter from trees on the verge, I have a few suggestions.

First, the plastic bags in which the litter was hung will split and shed their contents if left there for too long. So I suggest that a week or two is plenty long enough to leave the display in situ. Longer than that and the bags will start to burst open and you’ll have to start picking it all up again.

Second, I would personally advocate using a more humorous sign that wasn’t so confrontational to the litterers and that, perhaps, made them smile and actually succeeded in bringing them onside. How about something along the lines of “the litter you chucked is still hanging around”. Can any of you come up with some better suggestions ?

Finally, and linked to my first point, hanging litter from trees may be construed by some local authorities as itself littering. I would hope that they would see the creative value and the potential for changing people’s behaviour in the idea, but be prepared to convince council officers that leaving the litter hanging for a couple of weeks won’t do any harm and that you’ll remove it after that.

Do please let me know if you try this out and what the result was !

At Environment Questions in the House of Commons on 19th January, Caroline Spelman was asked some interesting points. First up was what steps she was taking to tackle littering and fly-tipping, to which she answered, among other things, that powers are being introduced to seize the vehicles of suspected fly-tippers and to increase the sentences that courts can hand out. Great stuff !

But then came a question about litter alongside busy roads and what more the Secretary of State could do to empower local councils to take effective action against people in vehicles who are responsible for such littering.

The Secretary of State began her answer to this question by pointing out, quite sensibly, that changing people’s behaviour was the key to solving this problem. But she then argued that we have to start in schools by educating children and taking them with us on litter picks “because it then dawns on them what a nuisance this [litter] is”.

In a sense what the Secretary of State says is correct but it skates over an unquestionable issue that has been thrown up by research that Keep Britain Tidy has carried out. This shows that it is actually the 18-24 age group who are the worst litterers. I have always deduced (although I don’t think that this has been proved beyond doubt by research) that this is because, while children in primary school love learning about litter and going on litter-picks, when young people advance into teenage years, many of them lose that learning as other priorities take over. I sense that this results in the 18-24 age range’s pride of place as the worst litterers.

So – please can we think more deeply before we voice the oft-repeated mantra that we need to educate schoolchildren if we are to solve the litter problem ? Yes, that is true to an extent. But what we urgently need to do is both to get the right message across to teenagers and those in their early 20s and we also need to get the message across to older adults who must, surely, contribute to much, if not the majority, of the litter that is flung out of vehicles.

So it is with great joy that I read about a man who lives in the village of Aldbourne, just outside Swindon, who took it upon himself to change the behaviour of some young litterers in the village.

Tim Beattie is clearly a man who gets things done. The 52 year-old motor engineer noticed that one of the litter grot-spots in the village was the place where the young people congregated. He decided to go and talk to them and he asked them why they didn’t put their litter in the bin. They said that there wasn’t a bin there and when Tim pointed out that there was indeed a bin on the other side of the Square, the youngsters replied that it was too far away and it was overflowing.

Tim offered to hang a rubbish sack near the bin where the young people sat and to empty it every day if they agreed to use it. They did use it and a normal litter bin was moved to that spot. But litter soon started appearing on the ground again and so Tim Beattie went back to talk to the young people. The idea then transpired of having a litter bin that was a bit different and, after a bit of brainstorming, a Tardis theme was decided upon.

The youngsters helped Tim design and build the Tardis bin and he even fitted a solar-powered light on top of it. It is still at the early stages and so too early to tell if it has solved the problem. But Tim did comment that someone had already agreed to pay for a Dalek bin.

So – what a wonderful story. It does go to show that a little lateral thinking and gentle discussion with litterers can lead to an excellent and creative solution to achieving the Holy Grail of behaviour change. You may have heard about the introduction of talking bins in parts of London which, when you drop litter into them, elicit a piece of music or a response recorded by a celebrity. There are so many ways to approach and solve this problem – and hats off to Tim Beattie for his brilliant achievement.

The story was this. A junior council officer at Bradford City Council had the idea of creating and distributing a leaflet aimed at discouraging Muslim people in Bradford from littering their streets. The leaflet invoked the name of Allah to encourage the residents to stop littering. It also referred to various themes from the Quran such as “keep our place of prayer clean”, “respect creation and the environment” and “be a considerate neighbour”. These are all good ideas and few people would argue with their sentiments – so what, you might wonder, was wrong with this leaflet and its planned distribution ?

Well, it is probably fairly intuitive to most of us that you don’t use someone else’s religion, or its tenets, to beat them round the head. Bradford City Councillor John Robertshaw, Chairman of the snappily-titled “Social Care Overview and Scrutiny Committee”, appears to have been the one who, on discovering the existence of this leaflet, put a stop to it. His view was that “If these [leaflets] had gone out, the Council could have been charged with inciting racial hatred, suggesting that litter dropping is exclusive to, or more prevalent among, Muslims…… What next ? Leaflets to individually alienate our Christian, Hindu and Buddhist residents ?”.

Actually, I think that Councillor Robertshaw was harping on the wrong note here, although I do recognise that this was a politician’s sound-bite and probably not quite the place to go into a detailed examination of community engagement strategy.

The point is surely this. It is by no means wrong in principle to take steps to convey a message to a defined group of people. And, conveyed in the right way, it should not matter if that group is defined by religious, ethnic, age, geographic or any other criterion. But what is key, surely, is that proper thought is given as to how best to ensure that the message is received positively by the group in question and then acted upon appropriately.

To give you an example, I have seen a wonderful leaflet which was produced for Muslim people by a group, themselves Muslims, who were keen to convey similar ideas to those contained in the Bradford City Council leaflet. The difference was that, in this case, it was one Muslim speaking to another and so didn’t incur the charge of a person or organisation, external to the targeted group of people, being patronising and accusatory to the group.

It’s also a fact of human nature that people don’t like being told what to do, least of all by someone from outside their natural community. The art of communication is just that – an art. And it needs to be studied and considered if it is to achieve the desired effect.

So, although the case of the Bradford leaflet is, news-wise, all about lecturing in a discriminatory fashion to a particular group, let us all learn the lesson from it that, to engage a community in a particular issue, we need to think how best to engage that community from within and not, as one of my local authority officer friends observes as happening so often in local government (and, no doubt in all sorts of other organisations), “produce a leaflet – job done !”.

So this would seem to indicate that the more effort we can put into trying to find ways of teenagers retaining the positive litter lessons of their early years, the better. When I talk to them, I always challenge young people to come up with some suggestions of how we can make it cool to put your litter in the bin. I am still waiting for the killer solution but maybe it’s a question (as so many things are) of lots of little solutions and ideas which, combined, will come together to make a big difference.

One recent innovation is litter bins that talk, with the voices of well-known people responding to the act of someone putting litter into the bin. This “nudge” will no doubt be effective as a carrot in encouraging people, young and old, to put litter into a bin.

“The carrot’s fine – but what about the stick ?”, I hear you ask. Well, up in Lanarkshire they have been trialling an interesting concept – that of handing out fines to teenagers who litter. This is a bold move as it is more complex to fine under 16-year-olds than it is to fine older people (and, in case you wonder, it is indeed legal to impose a fine on any child over the age of 10).

South Lanarkshire Council thought about their approach carefully. Secondary school teachers warned the young people and their parents that council enforcement officers would be on the look-out. Apparently, although no fines were handed out during the trial, 168 warnings were given (all of which resulted in the offender picking up the litter they had dropped) and, in most places, a noticeable reduction in litter was achieved.

Objectors to this scheme voiced concerns mainly about it being a revenue-raising exercise, being vulnerable to over-zealous enforcement officers and not addressing the root cause of the problem. In fact a case in Glasgow 3 years ago, where an autistic schoolboy was fined £50 for dropping a bag of chips when a seagull swooped down to attack him exemplifies the need to ensure that enforcement officers are well trained.

And Margaret Mitchell MSP wondered if a couple of hours of cleaning up would be a better penalty for a teenager than a fine.

Whatever your view on whether it is right or not to fine teenagers for littering, I think we should take heart that some local authorities are being thoughtful and creative about how to tackle this challenging age group. Watch this space for further innovative ideas.

I read a thought-provoking article this week by Kyle Price who writes for the News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington state in the US. The point that he was making was that, where littering is concerned, we should consider everywhere to be our neighbourhood. Kyle cited examples from beaches to national parks to roadside verges – all places which are far from where people live and so are considered fair game for disposing of unwanted packaging.

And this set me thinking. Keep Britain Tidy will be launching their excellent new message “Love Where You Live” in October. This is a much-needed and more personally relevant update to the traditional “keep Britain tidy” exhortation that has been with us for the past 60 years. Love where you live – cherish it, respect it, look after it and also look after the other people who live in it.

And it made me realise that we mustn’t fall into the trap of regarding “where you live” as the street, neighbourhood, village or town where we happen to be based. No – we live on Planet Earth and that means that we must love the whole planet and certainly not restrict our environmental amorousness to our direct locality. How else are we going to persuade people not to chuck rubbish out of car windows (which people rarely do in their own neighbourhood), not to drop litter on the beach (some of which then gets washed away to grace lovely places many miles away) or even not to heave their bulky unwanted items over the garden fence (especially when there is a railway or a road on the other side).

Kyle Price also wonders whether we should step up our attempts to involve offenders in clearing litter but he concludes that he’s not sure he wants “the cleaning of the Earth to be a job that’s relegated to criminals. It really should be a job for all of us”. And he thinks, in response to his occasional feeling that picking up litter is a futile exercise, that “a community often experiences a powerful, positive change not when one person performs a huge feat of generosity and goodness – the positives usually happen when a large number of people perform many small actions”.

So listen out for Love Where You Live next month and please bear in mind that you live not only at your address – you also live on Planet Earth. In Kyle Price’s words : “Everywhere is our neighbourhood”.

But what have really made me feel angry and frustrated are the glib and off-the-cuff explanations of why the riots happened. There is, of course, the apparent fact that there was a wide spectrum of motives among those who rioted and looted – they weren’t all unemployed gang members. Many were clearly of somewhat higher economic status, exemplified by the arrival in Clapham of two mini-cabs packed with looters. And as for the view that “this was pure criminality”, Harry Eyres in his excellent “Slow Lane” column in Saturday’s Financial Times put it perfectly : “To attribute it [civil disorder] to ‘criminality pure and simple’, as the British prime minister and others have done, is to commit the language crime of tautology. Of course criminality is criminality. But that gets you no closer to understanding anything”.

Among all the post-riot clamour, two views in particular caught my attention. First, Owen Jones (author of “Chavs : The Demonisation of the Working Class”) who shared the Newsnight platform with David Starkey (whose performance he amusingly described as “Enoch Powell meets Alan Partridge”). Jones quotes a resident of Ashington, a large Northumbrian mining village devastated by pit closures, as saying that young people, who had grown up with all the frustrations and boredom of poverty, felt that they had little future to look forward to. Jones cites a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report into gangs which concludes that there is a strong link between “territorial behaviour” and poorer communities – gangs provide some young people with the fun, excitement and support that they otherwise lack. So – it’s all about poverty, not ethnicity.

Second, Harriet Sergeant (author of the report “Fixing Broken Britain”, written for think-tank The Centre for Policy Studies) made some particularly penetrating observations. She has observed over recent years that the failure of white working class and black Caribbean boys to make the transition to manhood has left them dangerously disengaged from society, resulting in an increase in violent incidents and youth disorder. The root causes of this are a lack of male role models in the home and classroom, a failure of the education system, especially in basic literacy skills, and poor incentives in the job market due to benefit payments (it’s not worth finding a job) and immigration (all the theoretically accessible jobs have been taken by arrivals from abroad). This all reminds me of the African proverb that my friend Nathan Roberts of The Kaizen Partnership quoted to me recently : “If we do not initiate the young men, they will burn the village down – it’s the only warmth they can feel”.

So where does this leave those of us involved in picking up litter and trying to change the behaviour of the litterers and, generally, attempting to raise the spirit of our neighbourhood where the presence of litter spoils the beauty of the place and, at worst, makes us feel unsafe and invites crime ? Well, I think that the recent and ongoing discussions about the causes of the riots can help us understand much more clearly why certain antisocial behaviour occurs and what is behind it. I hope that it will also make those of us involved in litter issues in the more deprived areas of the country think in a different way about the people (mostly young) who behave in bad ways. Yes – of course there is a place for the stick where a criminal offence has been committed. But let’s give some thought to how we can use the carrot too.

I have no doubt that, given the right approach, we could persuade even gang members to take an interest in de-littering their neighbourhood. To my mind, it’s about changing our own mindsets as much as changing other people’s – rather than viewing a neighbourhood as a “problem area”, let’s redefine it along the lines that I recently heard someone use – “a less confident neighbourhood” i.e. an area where the challenge is to develop an understanding with the people and try to persuade them to employ their not inconsiderable energies onto improving their area and integrating themselves more deeply into society. What we, as members of volunteer litter groups, are in a very strong position to do is to afford disillusioned young people the chance to attain a sense of “I can achieve something”. Let’s think, those of us who are in a position to do so, about how we can make that contribution to strengthening our community before it’s too late.

It is, therefore, welcome news to those of us involved in the litter arena that Theodore Dalrymple has put pen to paper to contribute his thoughts on the topic. Dalrymple is a retired prison doctor and a psychiatrist.

Theodore Dalrymple’s essay entitled “Litter” is a fascinating addition to current thinking on the subject. Dalrymple was inspired to write about litter having driven from Scotland to London via the Lake District and seen the roadside “strewn practically every yard of the way with litter”. In fact he describes Britain as “one vast litter bin”.

Dalrymple contributes some significant fresh insights into the causes and origins of litter. For instance, he focuses much attention on the prevalence of fast food litter. This, he suggests, is due to the erosion of the tradition of the family eating together around the table (owing in part to the loss of the knowledge of how to cook) and the resultant fact that many young people are left to feed themselves when and where they wish. So eating becomes a random activity and litter on the street is the inevitable result. Dalrymple feels strongly that the increase in litter is due to more people dropping it and that you can’t attribute direct causation to the fact that there is more packaging to throw away – he is insistent that it is not permissible to blame the food industry for the fact that the country is littered. What is more, he is convinced that, due to the massive amount of litter ever present in our landscape, it is a large number of people who litter, not an antisocial minority (how could a minority have produced quite so much litter ?). He insists that it is wrong to believe that littering is due to anything other than bad character.

Dalrymple adds further insight by suggesting that our culture changed substantially after the Second World War in the sense that restraint was replaced by self-expression and that breaking the informal rules of society was felt by many to be a way to achieve personal freedom. Indeed, the well-known fact that a substantial amount of the litter that is dropped is deposited close to a litter bin can be seen as a kind of rebellion against authority, as well as a reluctance to interrupt one’s social life and divert one’s line of travel to a bin. And Dalrymple makes the interesting point that people don’t notice litter as they do not have the awareness of an unlittered past to compare it to.

A further characteristic that he identifies is what he terms an “exaggerated individualism” – an excessive preoccupation with one’s human rights which gives rise to self-righteous anger and the view that one is entitled to behave as one pleases. This is the attitude that many people encounter when they challenge a litterer and are confronted by a very severe and unpleasant reaction.

Dalrymple blames Margaret Thatcher for creating the Big Government to which the Big Society initiative is designed to be the antidote. It is Dalrymple’s view that, by introducing private business methods into the public sector, Thatcher created such an overbearing government which took away individual citizens’ responsibilities that people developed the attitude that they had paid their taxes so they could do what they wanted. One of my own personal bugbears is hearing the words “it’s the Council’s job” and that signifies the abdication of personal responsibility that leads to so much littering. Dalrymple also feels that we are all so well educated that we don’t want to carry out the menial jobs any more. So councils are much more content to be devising equal opportunities policies than cleaning the streets.

In the end, Dalrymple concludes that people litter because they were not brought up not to litter. This he equates with a lack of socialisation of the young. This is no doubt true and it is clear to those of us who are involved in tackling the litter problem that it will take many years to reverse the situation.

I enjoyed reading Dalrymple’s essay on litter. He provides some brilliant insights into why people litter, how society has broken down and how the disappearance of the nuclear family has led to unsocial and antisocial behaviour. But there are moments when I feel he goes too far – for instance, chewing gum does not, I think, automatically render the chewer aggressive. And I think that it would have been interesting to hear his views on some of the recent research that has been carried out on litter and on its causes and effects. I also feel that there are a couple of episodes where Dalrymple allows the philosopher in him to wander off a little too far into the blue yonder before returning to the matter at hand.

I would certainly urge anyone who has an interest in litter, and in fighting the battle against it, to read this book as it is wonderfully thought-provoking, masterfully expressed and adds a new dimension to current thinking, affording some excellent insights into the psychology of littering and to the change in social habits over the last 50 years that have, without doubt, contributed to making Britain so untidy. Dalrymple leaves us in no doubt as to the magnitude of the challenge that tackling the problem of litter constitutes and is, I suspect, the most successful litter author to date at explaining to us how deeply-rooted in our society is the cause of the litter that most of us are confronted with on a daily basis.

“Litter” by Theodore Dalrymple is published by Gibson Square (159 pages, £9.99)