More than 10% of Scotland's public spaces are now heavily polluted with rubbish, according to the latest comprehensive and gold-standard environmental survey.

That is up from under 4% less than a decade ago.

The nation, says Keep Scotland Beautiful or KSB, the third sector body which monitors the state of our streets, squares and parks, is now facing a “looming litter emergency” which is “hidden in plain sight”.

The figures, which are for the 2020-21 financial year, reflect the end of two difficult years when everything from waste collections to street cleaning and weeding was crippled by Covid.

However, they also mark a continued, wider trend for littering, flytipping and dog-fouling just as local and national authorities face the long-term consequences of tighter public spending dating right back to the 2008 financial crash.

Scottish litter - which often finds its way in our streams and rivers and then global seas - is not just a local problem. It now poses a threat to the nation’s efforts to do our bit to tackle man-made climate change, says KSB.

The charity is due to publish its annual Local Environmental Audit and Management System or LEAMS report later this year. This is based on checks on 13,000 locations which public bodies, mostly councils, are responsible for keeping clean.

As yet unpublished data seen by The Herald shows national figures got worse again last year, reaching their lowest figure since the audits began in the early part of this century.

Barry Fisher, KSB chief executive, said the both the physical survey - and separate polling of the public - tell a grim story.

He said: “It will once again highlight an avalanche of evidence from audits and public perception audits from the past two decades – all of which points to a looming litter emergency – hidden in plain sight.”

“Public perception, as published in the Scottish Litter Survey, indicates beyond doubt that litter is a matter of significant public concern, both at a national and a local level. Not only do people recognise that there is a problem, but they also believe that this has wider implications for their communities, in terms of perception, health and wellbeing and nature.”

The Government reckons that a quarter of a billion pieces of litter are dropped in Scotland every year. Another 26,000 tonnes of rubbish is illegally flytipped. Local authorities are not keeping up with this deluge.

The national 2021-22 LEAMS score was 89.7%, which means that 10.3% of sites inspected were officially deemed unacceptably filthy, from just 3.7% in 2013-14 to 7.7% in 2019-20. Only 20% of spots inspected over the year had no litter. That is an improvement from 16% in 2019-20 but well below a 31% figure recorded back in 2013-14.

The latest figures do not capture the consequences of recent industrial action, which visibly exposed just how much Scots throw away. They include the rise in face masks and other PPE strewn across public spaces during the pandemic.

The survey figures tally with public perceptions. New as yet unpublished data collected by independent pollsters for KSB found two out of three Scots thought litter as an issue where they lived and 87% thought it was a national problem.

Nearly three quarters of Scots polled - 72% - reported seeing litter in their areas “somewhat” or “very” often. That number rose to 81% for those living in the fifth most deprived neighbourhoods.

The latest LEAMS physical survey report confirmed this impression. Auditors found that nearly third of the spots they inspected in the most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods were unacceptably littered. That is three times the average and compares with just 4% of sites in the 20% least deprived parts of Scotland.

Mr Fisher said: “We estimate that more than a million people in Scotland are now living in places where local environmental quality is declining more rapidly than the national average. And, the gap between local environmental quality indicators in the most deprived and the most affluent communities is widening.”

The Scottish government is currently preparing a new national litter strategy. Several new ideas have been floated recent years, such as proposals to fine the registered owners of cars from which rubbish is seen to be chucked.

The new KSB opinion poll suggests Scots mostly blame individuals for the mess with nine out of 10 backing educational and behavioural change campaigns and 83% wanting tougher enforcement fines and penalties.

For Mr Fisher and KSB, there are no silver-bullet policies. Instead he thinks the time has come for the kind of strategic, long-term thinking which informed Scotland’s battle with violence.

He said: “It is all too easy to moan about litter and the state of our communities, but we don’t believe that pointing fingers and blaming anyone for the situation we find ourselves in is productive – we all have to accept that we share responsibility for this problem, and ultimately how we fix it. “The psychology and reasons for littering are complicated. The reality is that if we want to tackle litter effectively then we need to change public behaviour, we can keep cleaning up forever or we can work to ensure that litter and littering behaviour is changed for good, but that takes leadership, commitment, time and resources.

“That is why we support people and organisations who want to make a difference; whether that be cleaning up, surveying, delivering local on the ground campaigns, or raising the issue politically to highlight the scale and depth of the problem.

“As a country we need to harness the significant public concern that exists and turn it into a movement, a wave of change that makes the illegal behaviours at the root of littering unacceptable.”

“There are many complex reasons behind the increase in litter over the last decade: an absence of strategic and coordinated action across all sectors; an ongoing decline in funding available to tackle the issue; and large-scale, long term societal trends around consumption, convenience and single use.

“There is no doubt that since the financial crash, following a slight lag, the downwards trend in local environmental quality started to become apparent in 2012/13.

“It is clear that the impact of reduced funding for the public sector is being felt within local authority service departments which have the statutory responsibility for maintaining environmental quality standards.”

Much of the politics in Scotland has focused on this last aspect of the problem; how well councils clean the streets and collect our rubbish. But this, all experts stress, is jus part of the issue. A detailed regional breakdown of LEAMS data will be published later. But two-thirds of council areas saw higher levels of litter and other environmental blight in public spaces in 2021-22.

Mr Fisher said: “An important focus of the forthcoming national strategy has to be about how we foster collaboration, gather data to understand the problem and evidence of what works, and harness this to develop solutions that have a real impact on the ground, we can learn from the successful work done in other policy areas, for example the Violence Reduction Unit.

“We need to be creative and willing to take risks. To try new ideas, accept that some won’t work, learn from mistakes and move forwards. We need to speak to audiences in a way that they will hear and use appropriate communications approaches. But, alongside that we need action now – to start to tackle the causes of littering behaviour. To work in collaboration and roll out innovations we know that work.”