The president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), author Bill Bryson, has launched Stop the Drop, the charity's major campaign against the growing blight of litter and fly-tipping in England's countryside.

Stop the Drop will highlight the impact litter and fly-tipping has across England, and give people the campaigning tools to demand action. The charity is also lobbying for a new bottle deposit law.

Litter is becoming the default condition of the countryside, said Bryson. It is time that all of us did something about this. The landscape is too lovely to trash.

That is why CPRE is launching Stop the Drop, to make the countryside what it was almost everywhere until very recently, and what most of us still want it to be a place of cherished beauty and sometimes utter perfection.

The worsening nature of the litter problem is highlighted by the recent annual survey of local authorities by the Government's own litter watchdog, Encams.

Despite the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act (2005), which gives local authorities and others new powers to clean up litter, the survey shows the headline statistic on local authority performance has dropped from satisfactory to unsatisfactory.

Not one local authority was rated good. Litter and fly-tipping are major and growing problems across England, in both rural and urban areas. In the UK, an estimated 25 million tonnes of litter is dropped each year. And the problem is now five times worse than it was in the 1960s.

Statistics around fly-tipping are just as shocking: local authorities dealt with 2.6 million incidents in England in 2006-07 up five per cent on the previous year. However, only 1,700 people were successfully prosecuted for fly-tipping in that period, while taxpayers footed a clean-up bill of £73m.

Bill Bryson said: "The bodies responsible for cleaning up litter and fly-tipping admit it is getting worse and many local authorities remain magnificently relaxed when it comes to doing anything about it.

"The total sum of fines for littering collected nationally last year was just slightly over £1.5m, or about one-fifteenth of what the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea collects annually in parking fines.

"Of the 43,624 fines levied, only 26,818 were actually paid, resulting in considerable loss of revenue. And 72 out of 354 local authorities issued no penalties at all.

"Littering is not a crime that has anyone quaking for fear of the consequences, because by and large there are no consequences."

He added: "None of us need stand idly by as our towns and countryside are trashed. Of course it is vital that people do not drop litter in the first place, but local authorities, central Government and other public bodies have a duty to clear it up and should all give a much stronger lead on the problem. We can all put pressure on them to do so."

You can support CPRE's Stop the Drop campaign by visiting the website www.cpre.org.uk, and doing the following:

Lobby your local authority, and ask them what they are doing to clean up litter and fly-tipping in your area. Local authorities and other bodies have a duty to clean up litter within a specified period, but the figures show that 107 of 174 local authorities surveyed were rated unsatisfactory or poor on overall levels of litter. Not one was rated as good.

Join the online community LitterAction helping individuals and local groups organise clean-up drives and awareness raising activities in their local area.

CPRE will be lobbying the Government for more leadership to tackle litter and fly-tipping. The announcement in the recent Budget that supermarkets may have to charge to issue single-use plastic bags was a step in the right direction.

CPRE now wants to see action to introduce a nationwide deposit system for drinks containers similar to that in many other countries. Such a system would reward the public for returning used drinks containers, boost recycling and reduce litter.

Each household disposes of 500 plastic bottles a year (a total of 13 billion in the UK), but just 130 of these are recycled, meaning that 370 go to landfill, or into our streets, fields and hedgerows.

A 10p deposit system on plastic bottles alone could therefore earn an average family £50 a year just for returning their waste while contributing to a cleaner environment.

Bill Bryson concluded: "If you are bothered by a single piece of litter, or you are fed up with the blight of fly-tipping, or driven to distraction by the fact that litter costs a whopping £600m and more a year to clear up, this is the campaign for you."