Britain has the worst litter problem in the world and the best way to control it would be to set up roadblocks and fine anyone found with a clean car, an American best selling author and humourist has told a committee of MPs investigating how to clean up the environment.



David Sedaris, who lives in Sussex and has admitted to obsessively picking up litter for five hours a day, claimed poorer people who shop at Tesco were more likely to drop litter then wealthier shoppers who go to Waitrose.

“I don’t see opera tickets in the street. There’s a Waitrose supermarkert near where I live [yet] I found just one Waitrose bag last year. There’s also a Metro Tesco store and I find Tesco bags all the time. It’s fast foods and candy bars and crisps.

“I find more Mayfair cigarettes than any other brand. Are they not the cheapest? I’m not trying to sound like a snob but if you walk down a mile of road and take everything you find there’s no denying the things you find.

“Maybe people [in deprived areas] are throwing things out of their car windows as a way of saying ‘screw you. I don’t live here’.”

Sedaris told the communities and local government committee Britain was like a trash can. “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.

“It’s bad for the spirit to walk through filth. Littering is important. It’s disgraceful. Why should everyone live in a teenagers’ bedroom? Peek into a hedge here and it’s like a trash can... In London you’ll see trees with bags of dog crap under them.”

He recommended that litterers be given heavy on-the-spot fines and be shamed by their peers. “In Massachusetts there are now $10,000 (£6,600) fines for littering. It makes people think twice. Here it is £70. I would get litterers, study them, learn who they listen to to make relentless fun of them in commercials, so they would feel like ‘wow, that’s me in a bad light’. You want to create a system of abject paranoia, so no-one would feel safe.”

Cherry Lewis-Taylor, a McDonald’s franchisee with four restaurants, told the MPs that it was only a “tiny, tiny” minority of people who littered. “We have banners and bins, all our packaging is labelled, we do litter patrols and cleanup events. It’s education and campaigns that are the key,” she said.

Cigarette butts are the most common form of litter in Britain, the MPs were told, but Giles Roca, director general of the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association, said that local authorities and the Keep Britain Tidy (KBT) organisation refused to speak to the industry.

“The KBT wont talk to us. Local government will not talk to us. It is very difficult to engage with them,” he said.

“We have given out 100,000 free portable ashtrays a year. We are very happy to give them out with every packet. But personal ashtrays are just one solution. We need long-term behaviour insight projects, a mix of educational and behaviour change projects, as well as more ashtrays and bins,” said Roca.

In an earlier hearing, the MPs had been told by local authorities that there had been a massive increase in flytipping and littering because of increases in the fees to dump rubbish and because of austerity and council cutbacks.

“It is very difficult for local authorities,” said Phil Barton, chief executive of the charity Encams which runs the UK anti-litter campaign called Keep Britain Tidy.

“They get very unfair and mixed criticism from the media. On the one hand there is a strong line which says Britain is dreadful. We must do something about it. Local authorities, you are not doing enough. On the other hand when they do, we have stories about what we call ‘Sausagegate’, where somebody’s child dropped a sausage roll in Hull. There was a course of action taken and the council was vilified by the media.”