If there’s one thing that delights and angers me in roughly equal measures, it’s Keep Britain Tidy’s ‘Great British Spring Clean’ (held this year, over the past couple of weeks). Yes it’s a wonderful initiative which brings together our communities and breeds heroes - and, for a short time, certainly, makes a welcome difference to our neighbourhoods, but it’s an initiative the Association shouldn’t have had to invent and shouldn’t have to organise each year. Shutting the door after the horse has bolted is a phrase that springs to mind here, but it’s not Keep Britain Tidy’s fault; it’s our society’s. I’ve grumbled many times about the growing amounts of rubbish – and glass, I see when out and about in my home town of Epsom, Surrey… once part of what was known as the ‘Stockbroker belt’, (i.e. posh and leafy). It’s getting worse by the year and if we held a Spring Clean every month it wouldn’t be enough to make everything look as it used to. And it’s not just Epsom; it’s all over! We need to stop the rot but how do we do it?

  

I’ve long said we need to go back to educating children from a very young age that it’s not OK to litter, and for the older ones this should cover the dangers of leaving broken glass on which others can injure themselves. For ignorant parents who should be raising their children properly rather than encouraging them to run feral in our streets, and the rest who are old enough to know better, we need a real deterrent. Village stocks? Pelt the culprits with their own rubbish along with everyone else’s? Harsh community service? Your ideas please!

  

I can’t leave this without thanking all our nation’s heroes for supporting Keep Britain Tidy’s campaign which, since it began in 2016, have picked more than 4million bags of litter that would have otherwise remained in our beautiful outdoors, posing a threat to people, wildlife and marine life too.  Our ‘positive’ shot here shows volunteer Georgie-May Tearle, diagnosed with breast cancer aged just 29, who faced it by litter-picking and organising 'chest chats' alongside clean up events in Dacorum Borough - with one volunteer detecting her own breast cancer early as a result. Georgie is the deserving winner of the Golden Litter-Picker Award, chosen by the Great British Spring Clean team.