It was a small bottle but that did not make it any less shocking. A plastic water bottle cast aside by a walker lay on the Shropshire Way. It was a nasty intrusion of detritus into the Shropshire Hills which, compared to many areas of Britain, are fairly litter free. Bill Bryson is Britain's latest countryside champion. As President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, he has launched a three year anti-litter campaign "Stop the Drop". It is an excellent initiative, but how curious it is that it takes an American to issue a wake up call on how filthy our streets, lanes and fields have become. Sadly, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign has had little impact on the public consciousness since its brilliant public information films of the 1970s and it seems that we have become accustomed to living in our own filth. We have developed an attitude that keeping our towns and countryside clean is someone else's problem, so Bryson's call to clean up our act is overdue.
Many, including Bryson, see handing fines of £50 to litter droppers as part of the cure. The latest data show that 43,600 tickets were issued in the year to March 2007, collecting £1.5 million. In Shropshire just 28 tickets were issued, all in Shrewsbury. Just 16 were paid raising £800. As much as I detest litter, I have a growing dislike of the way we seek to improve behaviour by handing out fines and raking in the cash. No tickets were issued in South Shropshire. Let's keep it that way and concentrate on improving people's behaviour in our beautiful countryside. Let's avoid the scenes elsewhere where police officers arrest people for dropping apple cores, throw them into gaol and drag them before the courts.
Litter is not the only stuff disfiguring our countryside. Fly tipping of domestic items and commercial waste is a growing menace, encouraged by the fees levied to discourage landfill and reduce methane emissions. Yet again, an attempt to reduced greenhouse gases is having an undesirable side effect—a trashed countryside. Last year there were 279 recorded fly tipping incidents in South Shropshire, costing £14,000 to clean up. Across the county as a whole, 1,470 piles of garbage cost £90,000 to remove. The cost of dumping has been transferred from the individual to the council tax payer but no prosecutions resulted. Fly tipping is not a casual act like most littering and offenders should be prosecuted wherever possible.
Abandoned vehicles are also a problem, especially on farmland. Walk the Shropshire Way to Bishops Castle and you will see several. Most were perhaps not dumped deliberately, but have become disused, derelict and decrepit over the years. Surely its time that we helped farmers out and financed a campaign to clear all manner of debris from the hills of South Shropshire?
Andy Boddington
Published in the Clun Chronicle, June 2008