Plans are being drawn up for a zero-tolerance approach to gum

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The proposal was put ­forward by a consortium of fed-up business people who kept treading in the “irritant substance”.

The zero-tolerance approach was suggested after 22 pieces of discarded gum were found in one square foot of the town’s pavement.

Plans are being drawn up to enforce a Singapore-style rule, with on-the-spot fines of £80 for flouting the law.

The difficulty with this will be how easy is it to enforce

Now they plan to lobby ­Milton Keynes Council – which spends hundreds of thousands of pounds cleaning pavements every year – to enforce a bylaw.

Business group spokesman Carmel Blyth said: “Cleaning this mess up is an impossible task. It is costly and takes time, not to mention unpleasant.

“We are also trying to get the message across to people to be considerate.

“It is a problem in central Milton Keynes, but I also think it is a nationwide problem.”

If the town of 250,000 people adopts a blanket ban it would bear striking similarities to the draconian rules brought in on the island republic of ­Singapore. The strict ban on selling, importing or manufacturing gum was introduced by the city state’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, who also became fed up with the litter.

Those caught breaking the Singapore law can be fined but not, as is often claimed, sentenced to corporal punishment.

Gum smugglers face up to a year in jail and a fine of £10,000.

It is thought police officers on the beat in Milton Keynes would be charged with enforcing the new ban and issuing fixed penalties to anyone caught breaking the law.

Last night local councillors appeared to warm to an idea that would be popular among parents, if not teenagers.

Milton Keynes council leader Andrew Geary said: “This is the kind of thing where we say if people want to come to us with a proposal, then we are quite prepared to listen.

“The difficulty with this will be how easy is it to enforce. I don’t perceive gum to be a massive problem from what I have seen, but if other people do and there are areas where the evidence clearly shows that it is, then we are quite prepared to listen.”

Across the country, councils spend £150million a year cleaning chewing gum up from their streets.

The British chewing gum market is reported to be currently worth an incredible £258million per year.

Many local councils have tried introducing so-called “gum walls” to encourage users to stick their discarded goo on dedicated areas – but the walls have been almost universally ignored.

Instead, the streets of every town and city in Britain are pebble-dashed with hardened gum that is virtually impossible to remove.

Phil Winsor, the chairman of the group of business people who put forward the pioneering idea to Milton Keynes Council, said: “Chewing gum ­littering has become an unattractive irritant that many wish to see the back of.”