SOMETIMES it takes an outsider to tell people what they've got. So let me remind you of an extremely urgent fact.

Nowhere in the world is there a landscape more artfully worked or more lovely to behold than the countryside of Britain.

OVER-FLOWING: Rubbish

But when I look around the country today I see litter and rubbish piling up and ruining the landscape.

HAVE YOUR SAY: ARE LITTER LOUTS WRECKING BRITAIN?

When I first came here in 1972 I was instantly smitten with the place, and for all kinds of reasons.

But a big part of what appealed to me about Britain was how tidy it was, how orderly, how civilised and well put together. Now we should be ashamed of the mess that we allow to greet visitors. Litter has increased relentlessly ever since I've been here-a whopping 500 PER CENT. Yet I remember when litter was a national shame and we had telly adverts telling us to Keep Britain Tidy.

Now it's time to Get Britain tidy. But there's no high-profile campaign to remind us that it's OUR job to take care of our own litter.

For example, Britain has some of the toughest litter laws in Europe.

But it's left to individual councils to decide on how to enforce them. And there's no consistent national approach.

YUK: Gum sticks to shoe

In Southwark, south London, they track down the droppers, hit them with fixed penalties of up to £75. There were nearly 3,000 issued in the last year.

Other councils, such as Camden across the river, don't bother catching litter louts. They issued ZERO fines last year.

So that sends out a mixed message-in some places it's OK to drop your trash on the streets and in other places it's not.

Worse

In fact if you live in Camden, Harrogate, Derbyshire, Salisbury, Stafford or Woking-to name just a few of the 74 authorities that gave out no fixed penalty litter notices at all last year-you won't be caught at all. EVER.

And when I look around I don't see a great deal of political will to do anything about it.Chewing gum perfectly illustrates where I think we are going wrong with litter in this country. The worse the mess gets-the more we spend on clearing it up.

TIP: Rubbish at Dome

Liverpool has spent £73 million on smartening up its streets for its year as Capital of Culture. But now they are being pot-marked with blackened gum, and this disgusting habit costs us nationally £150 million a year. At least in the cities most of the litter gets picked up at some point. But out in the countryside it tends to accumulate and becomes a more or less PERMANENT feature of the landscape.

The rubbish in rural areas is coming straight out of car windows. Half of people admit to throwing litter out as they go and there are no street sweepers out here.

How anybody could trash a country as lovely as Britain is really beyond me. But things have got so bad that the Highways Agency now spends £500MILLION every year just clearing up main roads.

The fact is it is our legal right to have litter-free streets and open spaces. If they are not we can use the courts to force councils and land-owners to clear up.

MESS: Fly-tipping

You can dismiss a lot of littering as thoughtless laziness. But there is one form of littering that is both criminal and deliberate-FLY TIPPING. Again there seems to be a distinct lack of will to engage with the problem.

Annually councils pay £73MILLION to clear-up fly-tipping and it costs private landowners another £47MILLION. But the prosecution rate is abysmal. This is a crime that is committed 2.6 MILLION times a year and costs us in excess of £120 MILLION a year to clear up.

You'd think the authorities would be all over this, catching the perpetrators and fining them robustly. But 70 PER CENT of councils have NOT prosecuted a single fly-tipper in the last FIVE years.

If we managed to catch just TWO PER CENT of the people who do the fly-tipping - and that doesn't seem too ambitious a target for such a visible and oafish crime-and fined them just one twentieth of what the law actually allows that would raise more than £130 MILLION for the economy.

Alternatively we can do as we are at present, and stand meekly by and just watch as another 50,000 heaps of squalor are dumped every week.

And yet it really only takes TWO things to crack the litter problem. You've got to STOP people dropping it in the first place-and when its dropped you've got to get it PICKED UP.

For no one wants to live in a country that's only beautiful from the ankles up.

* You can see Bill on Panorama: Notes On A Dirty Island on BBC1 at 8.30pm on Monday, August 11.