£58m bill to clear up 1m fly-tipping cases
MORE than a million cases of fly-tipping were dealt with by councils in England last year as the taxpayer faced a £58million clear-up bill.
Incidents of illegal waste dumping rose for the fourth year in a row, according to figures.
About 56,000 fixed-penalty notices were handed out by councils to people caught illegally dumping.
Authorities across England recorded 1,002,154 cases in 2016/2017, up seven per cent on the previous year, official statistics show.
Fly-tipping ranged from dumping bags of household waste, fridges and other white goods to construction rubble, tyres, asbestos and even animal carcasses.
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Around two thirds of flytipping cases were of household rubbish.
Clearing up the waste cost local authorities £57.7million last year, while they carried out 474,000 enforcement actions, which cost £16million.
Most of the councils reporting the highest number of flytipping cases were London boroughs and cities such as Manchester and Liverpool.
The figures come after the Government gave councils powers to issue on-the-spot fixed-penalty notices of £150 to £400 for small-scale cases in May 2016.
A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said: “Fly-tipping is an unacceptable blight on our landscape.
“We have cracked down on offenders by strengthening sentencing guidelines and giving councils the powers to hand out on-the-spot fines.”
A Freedom of Information request to English councils revealed that they had issued thousands of the new penalties, but around twofifths had not used the powers.
The Defra figures show that the overall number of fixed-penalty notices for fly-tipping, which also include fines for littering, duty of care and anti-social behaviour, totalled 56,000 in 2016/2017, an increase of 56 per cent on the previous year.
Meanwhile, prosecutions fell by a quarter, down from 2,135 in 2015/2016 to 1,602 last year.
The most common place for fly-tipping was on roads, and the average amount was equivalent to a “small van-load”.
The figures do not include the majority of incidents of waste illegally dumped on private land, where landowners are liable for disposal.
But the rise comes as cashstrapped councils increasingly charge households to pick up bulky waste. Many are also moving to less frequent collections of household rubbish.
In England, 76 per cent of councils now only pick up residual waste once a fortnight, while six councils collect every three weeks.
A Number 10 spokesman said yesterday: “Fly-tipping is never acceptable and councils have a full range of tools at their disposal to tackle this issue.
“We have been very clear that we support frequent and comprehensive bin collections, it’s up to councils to decide on the litter collection strategy.”