Stats fly in face of messy problem for our councils
IT’S one of those British things that bewilder overseas visitors: pub etiquette, queuing, cricket, scotch eggs, Marmite, and ‘fly-tipping’. One reason in fly-tipping’s case, I think, is its etymology.
We’ve linked a Victorian expression, ‘on the fly’, meaning just quickly or casually, with a modern-day transgression, thereby almost trivialising something quite serious – the statutory offence of illegal waste-dumping – in a way that can seem characteristically British.
I’m typically guilty – not of fly-tipping itself, but this is the first time I recall writing about it, previously preferring to leave it to the better informed likes of the Post’s Neil Elkes and Carl Jackson. Indeed, even this effort was prompted by the impression that everyone else was doing it too.
Some, certainly, were responding to January’s introduction by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) of new penalties of up to £400, directed at householders as well as actual fly-tippers. The announcement was accompanied by a smug note about how “the government’s crackdown on fly-tippers is delivering results, with no 2017/18 increase in the number of incidents for the first time in five years.”
Consciousness raised, the
Coventry Telegraph, the Post’s sister paper, was quickly complaining about the “bulky waste postcode lottery”. It said Coventry Council’s bulky waste collection charges were more expensive than Birmingham’s – and that, whatever DEFRA said, Coventry’s illegal dumping cases were way up on last year.
A fortnight ago it was Birmingham’s turn, highlighted in the council’s post-consultation budget revisions, as reported by Carl Jackson in the Post (January 31). These included increased bulky and green waste collection fees (which should please Coventry electors, if not Birmingham’s) and reduced funding for fly-tipping enforcement.
Council Leader Ian Ward gave an assurance that, with more staff issuing fixed penalty notices, there would be no drop in prosecution numbers. Although, when DEFRA’s statistics show our modest 89 prosecution cases in 2017/18 apparently costing more than £1,100 each – compared to the £333 national average and Manchester’s 275 at £140 each – this may prove a mixed blessing.
Reader alert time! These are the first statistics quoted so far, but there’s no avoiding them completely. Just Google ‘DEFRA – Fly-tipping Statistics’ and you’ll see they code each of last year’s 998,000 reported incidents into nearly a hundred possible categories, and it was an examination of a very, very small selection of those stats that prompted this column.
More specifically, it was the Mail on Sunday’s decision to use them to make “fly-tipping crimes” last week’s “shocking” revelation with which to trash the nation’s local councils. Headline: “Just one in 450 fly-tipping crimes end up in court, only 25 sent to prison.”
Oh dear, I thought – yet another story, based on headline national statistics, where Birmingham gets pilloried for the unpardonable sin of being biggest. But I was wrong. This time it was Leeds, with nearly 27,000 reported fly-tipping incidents. Birmingham’s 15,993 barely made the national top ten, adrift also of six London boroughs, Liverpool and, rather surprisingly, Northampton.
However, explain this, if you can. Leeds’ returns included just 43 ‘Animal Carcass incidents’, against Birmingham’s 1,527, more than a quarter of the English total. By contrast, Leeds recorded 2,565 ‘Back Alleyway incidents’ (we’re still talking fly-tipping!) modest compared to Plymouth’s extraordinary 13,700, yet Birmingham contributed just 125, or 0.1 per cent of the national total.
It’s obviously a complex world, fly-tipping – though not to the Mail on Sunday, which had a clear mission. If they break the law, they’re criminals, who aren’t going to be bothered by warning letters, or fixed penalty notices and fines – “often less than the cost of paying to use a licensed tip or waste disposal site”, and even when issued they covered fewer than seven per cent of offences.
Never mind any la-di-da cost/ benefit calculations: charge them, convict them, and lock ‘em up. Well, far more of them, anyway, and presumably in our notoriously half-empty prisons.
I don’t know if DEFRA press officers always respond reflexively to media alarm stories, but they did here.
First, as noted, fly-tipping incidents were actually down in 2017/18 – not by much, but, helpfully for DEFRA statisticians, to below the mortifying million. Second, local authority enforcement actions had increased, and fixed penalty notices had shot up by 20 per cent – the issuing, that is, not the payment.
No response, though, to the Mail on Sunday’s tricky statistic of the 171 English councils (41 per cent) who didn’t bring a single prosecution between them. In this, the West Midlands was typical. Apart from Birmingham’s 89, the numbers were Coventry 10, Wolverhampton 2, Sandwell 1, Dudley, Solihull and Walsall 0.
Which put me in what my mother would have called a pickle.
Did the Mail on Sunday, just this once, have a case? Fly-tipping has become a minor industry, costing English local authorities millions each year in clearance costs alone.
Add in reductions in weekly rubbish collections and closures of recycling centres, and at least some councils – particularly any about to cut enforcement funding – could be losing the plot.
Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham
Fly-tipping has become a minor industry, costing local authorities millions each year