They don’t mess about with litter louts in Singapore.

A first offender who dumps a food wrapper or a cardboard McDonald’s drink cup can be fined $2,000. Do it again and the fine goes up to $4,000.

On top of that, they could be hit with a Community Work Order and be forced to do 12 hours street cleaning in a distinctive orange jumper.

And if they are daft enough to do it a third time they can expect a fine of $10,000, another work order and a sign round their neck saying: I am a litter lout.

What do we do here? Not very much. Littering in the UK has become endemic and continues to get worse, according to a report out this week. It costs taxpayers £850m a year in England.

The deterrents are hardly draconian with a standard on-the-spot fine of £80 which seems to be rarely applied.

Among the worst is fly tipping and fast food litter. Both have gone up 20% in the last year, during which there were 850,000 recorded incidents of fly tipping but only 2,000 convictions.

The Communities and Local Government Committee wants better enforcement of laws with bigger fines. “England is a litter-ridden country compared to most of Europe, North America and Japan,” the report said.

It called for legislation to force fast food shops and restaurants to tidy around their premises and put messages on their packaging to remind customers to dispose of litter responsibly.

As if a message on a pizza box will make any difference to a litter lout. I take a morning walk almost every day and am appalled at the cans, bags and rubbish discarded by the side of country roads, in woods and fields, and at beauty spots like Beaumont Park and Castle Hill.

A layby is used as a dumping ground when a motorist decides his car is messy. Walk around town or village and you will stumble across pizza boxes, polystyrene chip containers and general litter. It seems offenders have their brains wired differently to everyone else and simply don’t care that they are polluting social space. Have they never heard of personal and collective responsibility?

Jeremy Paxman, patron of the Clean Up Britain campaign, says: “This country is in a disgusting state. If we don’t do something now we’ll be handing on the country to our children and grandchildren and inviting them to live in basically a rubbish tip.”

Appealing to the better nature of litter louts will not work, as they don’t have one.

Punishment and retribution are the only remedies they would understand. Which is why fly tippers should have their rubbish dumped in their front rooms and street offenders bagged in strong plastic along with aged household waste with only their head sticking out and left for 24 hours to mature.

See how they like it when it’s close and personal. Maybe then they might change their ways.

But I doubt it.