A PEER called Lord Robathan has suggested that primary school pupils should pick up litter as part of the National Curriculum.

On the face of it, this is a sensible suggestion, given that it would encourage our youngest children to be tidy, while making them aware of the environment around them from an early age.

However, while turning our tots into unpaid refuse collectors is a lovely idea as far as young citizenship is concerned, there is a much wider issue at play here. Put bluntly, why are we such a slovenly nation? The United Kingdom is one of the wealthiest, most civilised, democratic, socially enlightened nations on the planet – yet our littering habit is nothing short of disgraceful.

Driving around our beautiful county recently, I have been struck by the scale of our littering problem. Last Wednesday, returning from a day in (equally litter-blighted) Lancashire, I was horrified to see the amount of rubbish strewn along the entire length of the A590 – just as I had been appalled a few days earlier at the state of the roadside on parts of the A6 between Penrith and Kendal.

With our trees and hedgerows yet to burst into spring leaf, our litter-laden roadsides are shown off in all their stark, winter squalor. Bags, bottles, packets and other day-to-day debris: it’s shameful; and I dread to think what visitors to the county must think.

Every week, civic-minded groups of volunteers arm themselves with bin bags and litter pickers, to do something about the shocking amount of rubbish other people discard. These doughty do-gooders are to be congratulated and praised for their noble efforts.

But you can guarantee that, no matter how many public-spirited volunteers turn out to clean up our environment, they are, sadly, vastly outnumbered by the people in our communities who think it is perfectly acceptable to discard their litter and rubbish wherever they damned well like.

While disposing of litter is of course a matter of personal responsibility, our local councils must shoulder some of the blame. Smaller wheelie bins (ours are barely big enough to take a couple of bags of household rubbish), fewer collections and draconian recycling rules all surely play a part in the recent rise in fly-tipping.

National newspapers regularly carry horror stories about enforcement officers putting the frighteners on householders who have inadvertently contravened some ridiculous and arbitrary rule about rubbish disposal – and of huge penalties being imposed on the alleged miscreants.

A recent example of this was the case of Alison Mapletoft, a Brighton business owner who works from home, who was given a £600 fine – and threatened with jail for good measure – after putting a single piece of rubbish addressed to her company in the wrong bin. Such behaviour is unacceptable; and it is no wonder that as the number of people employed by councils as “litter police” rises, so too, in many parts of the country, does the number of fly-tipping incidents. Why get fined hundreds of pounds for putting your litter in the wrong receptacle, when you can quietly dump it somewhere instead?

But it is the casual, couldn’t-give-a-damn litter-dropping habit of so many people which is the real blight on our society. From the disgusting habit of spitting chewing gum onto pavements, to dropping burger wrappings, plastic water bottles and cigarette ends (and packets) in our streets, we seem to have tacitly encouraged generations of Britons to think this is an acceptable way to behave.

Fear of what might happen stops many of us from challenging litter droppers and shaming them into picking up their rubbish – just as we are reluctant to ask people to curb bad language in public.

While the older generations are horrified by our litter-ravaged streets and roadsides, some of our younger generations blithely carry on with their anti-social habits; perfectly happy to ruin the environment by their careless, thoughtless, litter-dropping habits.

It has taken the nonagenarian Sir David Attenborough to get through to millions of people about the hazards of plastic in our oceans. If only our untidy younger generations would listen to their elders about the sea of litter they are creating in our local communities as well.