The canal bank beside Northbrook Street near Birmingham city centre looks and smells like a tip. The grass is strewn with plastic cups, fag packets, cans, tins, wraps, cloth, papers, peel, binliners, bags, butts and bottles. Builders have come in vans and flytipped waste, kids have graffitied the brickwork.



The canalside has been nominated by the public as one of the worst “grotspots” in British cities and an army of volunteer litter pickers will descend on it and hundreds of other places in March in an attempt to tackle what has become known as the “blight of Britain”.

For Chris, a retiree living in the nearby north Summerfield, the litter is offensive, depressing and incomprehensible. “I have challenged people. You watch them eat their sandwiches and then chuck the packaging away. ‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘I live here.’‘Oh I am sorry,’ they say. People know what they are doing is wrong but they think someone else pays the bills,” she says.

Chris, who asked not to give her full name, says she doesn’t blame the council, which she says has good people trying to clean up Birmingham’s mess. But she says 40% austerity cuts have made a bad littering problem worse across the whole city.

“There’s just no money now to clean it up. It’s alright in the city centre but everywhere else it’s terrible and getting worse. They’ve cut billions from the budget. They do online consultations and say ‘do we clean up the litter or cut children’s services?’ Of course people say ‘we can’t cut the childrens’ budget’.



“I just don’t understand people who litter. I have seen cars stop at traffic lights, a door open and a used takeaway bag put on the road. What do you do? It’s a culture. Perhaps it starts in schools.”

The government-backed “Clean for the Queen” event on 4-6 March is billed as the largest ever clean-up of the British environment. Schools, community groups, individuals, charities, companies, local authorities and parish councils are expected to clean up litter-blighted areas ahead of the Queen’s 90th birthday in June.

The stark fact is that Britain is one of the most litter-blighted countries in Europe, says Adrian Evans, who oversaw the festivities on the river Thames that marked the Queen’s diamond jubilee in 2012. He now heads the government-backed Clean for the Queen campaign, which brings together all of Britain’s litter groups for the first time.



“Our ambition is to create a community-inspired, grassroots mass action event – one that will become a recurring annual initiative. We feel that marking the Queen’s 90th birthday with the inaugural clean-up is a wonderful way to kickstart it.

“We want to show that millions of people in this country care passionately about the litter affecting the nation and are prepared to get out and do something about it. Everyone in this country will reap the benefits.”



Litter is widely seen as a British problem, says US writer David Sedaris who lives in Kent and picks litter from the hedgerows. “You have to go deep into eastern Europe to find it so bad. I have never seen anything like this in Japan or France. It’s obviously a cultural problem,” he told a committee of MPs last year.

A recent Populus survey found that 90% of respondents consider litter to be a massive issue, with 81% saying that seeing litter makes them angry and frustrated.

It also found that 82% thought having litter on the streets encouraged other people to drop litter, and 93% said that littering shows a lack of respect for the environment. However, 61% of people said they would be afraid to confront people who drop litter.

“Rates of fast food littering and flytipping are on the rise and people find this really offensive. We are now on the verge of a crisis,” said Richard McIlwain, operations director of Keep Britain Tidy.

“We seem to have more litter than anywhere else in the world. The risk is that over the next five years local authorities will come under even more financial pressure and will have to cut back on services further. If so, we will see environmental degradation across large areas of Britain and people’s sense of wellbeing will decline.”

Around 2.25m pieces of litter are dropped on the streets of the UK every day. Thirty million tonnes of rubbish are collected from England’s streets each year and it costs councils more than £1bn a year to clean up.

Hotspots include canals and verges but also motorways. The Highways Agency clears about 180,000 sacks of litter from motorways and A-roads alone. In 2013-14, local authorities dealt with 852,000 flytipping incidents in England and Wales. These cost roughly £45m to clear up.

Government figures show that the number of flytipping incidents increased for the second year running in 2014-15 and council funding for street cleaning has fallen for the fourth year running.