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Well, we at the Campaign to Protect Rural England believe that people do care - care very much - and for the past ten months I have been talking to officials and landowners, going out with litter and fly-tipping crews, poring over parliamentary reports and drawing endlessly on the brains of CPRE staff to see if there aren't some practical steps we can take to make things better. The result is a big, ambitious, three-year campaign called Stop the Drop, which we are launching this week, to try to get behaviour changed and laws enforced.

Let me remind you of an extremely urgent fact: nowhere in the world is there a landscape more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, more artfully worked, more visited and walked across and gazed upon than the countryside of England. It is a glorious achievement and much too lovely to trash.

Yet most authorities continue to deal with litter as if it were 20 years ago and there wasn't much of it about. Well, I think it is time for government at all levels to recognise that things are in fact not good - that there is lots of litter and other homeless debris out there, that it is often left to accumulate for far too long, particularly in the countryside, and that decisive action needs to be taken on several fronts. We have moved past the age of Keep Britain Tidy. It is time to Get Britain Tidy.

This is not an unreasonable ambition. To achieve it, we need to make just two things happen. We need to stop litter being dropped in the first place, and we need to make sure that litter that is dropped gets picked up.

BACKGROUND

• Do you live in Britain's most unkempt street?

• Litter tax plan to boost recycling

• Clean sweep sees litter louts fined £1m

Rubbish fee to worsen fly-tipping, say Tories

Charges for domestic rubbish will lead to an extra 155,000 tonnes of fly-tipping a year across England, it was claimed

• ‘Chip-and-bin’ tax aims to force more recycling

• Cash schemes the key to cut England's waste

• Fewer bin collections a rubbish idea

BACKGROUND

• Councils get tough on bin collections

• Pay-as-you-throw rubbish tax approved

• Clean sweep sees litter louts fined £1m

• Private binmen move into the collection gap

Litter bugged

Bill Bryson, champion of rural England, tells of his drive to stop the rubbishing of the nation

BACKGROUND

• Bryson joins battle to stop 'trashing of countryside'

• Waste Not, Want Not

• Fly-tipping reaches new heights

• Householders face £200 tax to empty rubbish bins

Britain's bin baron says: get recycling like the Germans

The man with a mission to make us Europe's greenest nation tells John-Paul Flintoff the war will start with supermarket packaging

BACKGROUND

• Illegal waste shipped back to Ireland

• Environment: higher fines for litter and graffiti

• Litter wardens to lead drive for clean streets

• Here's how to show zero tolerance to spitting yobbery

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In practical terms, that means instituting a few fundamental changes - like ensuring that existing laws are robustly and uniformly enforced. Litterers and fly-tippers must be made to feel that there is a reasonable chance they will be caught and that, if caught, they will be given a punishment that is meaningfully painful. If, for instance, you put three points on the licence of any person caught littering from a vehicle, a lot of white vans would become instantly law-abiding, believe me. If you fined them £1,000 on top, I think you would have a clean countryside pretty quickly.

People often say that catching litterers and fly-tippers is nearly impossible - Joan Ruddock, the parliamentary under-secretary at Defra, made this very point to me - because mostly they do it stealthily when no one is looking. Well, shoplifters are stealthy too, but they get caught often enough. It's just a question of training people to look in the right places at the right times.

Every year, according to Defra's own figures, 2.6 million instances of fly-tipping occur in England. If we apprehended just 2 per cent of fly-tippers - which doesn't seem a terribly ambitious target for such a visible and oafish crime - and fined them each £2,500, or one twentieth of what the law allows, that would raise a magnificent £130 million, enough to clean up every loose scrap of litter in the country.

Alternatively, we can continue to do as we are now, which is to catch almost nobody and instead stand mutely by as another 2.6 million heaps of squalor are added to the landscape every year. Wouldn't it make sense to invest in some special teams and equipment and see if we can't generate some useful revenue from these devious miscreants?

All that is lacking is the will. At the moment government policy couldn't be a great deal more remote and ineffectual. Consider this: last year Defra wrote to every local authority asking them how many Litter Clearance Notices they had issued in the previous year. Barely a quarter of authorities replied. They didn't reply for the same reason that they almost certainly didn't issue any Litter Clearance Notices either: because nobody really cares whether they do or not. Well, I think somebody should care. It is time for local authorities to get serious about their responsibilities and for central government to get serious about local authorities.

The Government, or Defra, or somebody, needs to come up with a clear, co-ordinated, committed plan to make Britain clean again and to ensure that standards of cleanliness are met equally everywhere. What exactly that plan might consist of I am happy to leave to wiser heads, but I would respectfully suggest that any campaign ought at least to consider the following:

First, there really must be a dedicated programme of lifelong education. I am told by Encams that the education department has no policy on littering and offers no special guidance to schools. That must change. It's time we taught kids the values of decency and why it is important and right to behave responsibly, and those lessons should be reinforced throughout their lives by public service ads. (And when was the last time you saw one of those for litter?)

Then we must get existing litter cleaned up. Those who have land in their care - Network Rail, the Highways Agency, local authorities and so on - must be made to take their clearance obligations seriously.

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