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Now here is a fact to make you sit up. In the three years to last November, the city of Sheffield recorded a rather whopping (but by no means exceptional) 441,361 instances of fly-tipping. In the same period, it managed to catch and prosecute exactly one person.

That's pretty remarkable, but it's not actually the fact I am on about. The fact I am on about is this: when the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs released its latest annual fly-tipping survey, Sheffield was held up as a model because the number of fly-tipping incidents there fell from 161,000 to 108,000 over the year.

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BACKGROUND

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That is an improvement, to be sure, but a rather dispiriting one nonetheless. We have reached the point where it is considered cheering news when only 300 vanloads of rubbish a day are illicitly dumped along a city's streets.

Now I am no authority on law enforcement, but it seems to me that when you have a crime in which the risks of being caught are one in 440,000, it is unlikely that people will be sufficiently unnerved to give it up. That certainly seems to be the case with fly-tipping and its ubiquitous cousin, littering.

And Sheffield, incidentally, is actually comparatively diligent in terms of fly-tipping arrests. In most areas dumping rubbish carries no risk at all. According to Environment Agency figures, 70 per cent of local authorities have not prosecuted a single fly-tipper in the past five years.

With litter the chances of being caught are even slimmer. It is hard to say exactly how slim because reliable figures are so hard to come by. According to Encams, the parent body of Keep Britain Tidy, “over 30 million tonnes of litter are collected from our streets every year and an estimated 1.3 million bits of litter are dropped on our roads every weekend”, but I suspect those numbers may be a trifle fanciful. Thirty million tonnes works out at half a tonne of litter per person, which seems unlikely unless people somewhere are throwing out anvils with their crisp packets and pizza boxes, whereas 1.3 million bits of litter per weekend is almost certainly a severe underestimate.

What is certain is that a discouragingly large amount of illicit detritus ends up as a permanent landscape feature. Many local authorities remain magnificently relaxed when it comes to doing anything about it. Among those that took no action at all against litterers in the latest year for which figures are available - and this really is the barest sampling - were Eastbourne, Guildford, the New Forest, Poole, Rochford, Salisbury, Norwich, Stevenage, Warrington, Scarborough and Gateshead. Slough, heroically, managed to catch and fine one person.

The total sum of fines 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 paid. Littering is not a crime that has anyone quaking for fear of the consequences because, by and large, there are no consequences.

But there are consequences aplenty for all the rest of us, of course, and they are there to be seen in drifts of fluttering plastic bags and discarded tinny glitter along roads and byways up and down the country. Litter is becoming the default condition of the British roadside. Often these days you feel as if you are driving through a kind of large, informal linear tip. Surely we are entitled to expect better. A clean and lovely countryside shouldn't be a surprise. It should be a right.

Litter breeds more litter. That is a simple, immutable fact. Clean environments tend to stay clean; dirty ones always get dirtier. If a local authority allows rubbish to pile up along its roadsides, the message it sends to people driving past is: “Go ahead and drop some more. We don't care about our corner of England. Why should you?”

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