FLY-TIP BRITAIN
With a million cases a year, it’s blighting lives. Yet the authorities don’t seem to care and the minister in charge dismisses it as ‘litter’. So as councils make it harder to get rid of rubbish and gangs move in... who WILL stop the despoiling of our cou
THOUSANDS of people must drive past this mess every day. If you head north on the A1 out of London, look to the left as you pass Stevenage and you’ll see it soon enough — pile after pile of rubbish on a side-road below.
Sadly, fly-tipping has now reached such epidemic proportions that few passers-by will even be surprised.
The Government has just announced the worst figures on record: nearly one million incidents last year in England alone.
Two thirds consisted of household waste — the sort of stuff councils used to take away in the old days until the introduction of fortnightly collections and colour-coded wheelie bins.
That’s just the rubbish dumped on public land. Shockingly, two thirds of farms in England and Wales are also hit by flytippers each year — and the farmers must pay for the clear-up themselves.
We’re not just talking about the odd sofa. In places such as Essex, it is mafia-style convoys of lorries carrying 20-ton loads.
And the 2017 fly-tipping season is only just getting under way.
With spring — along with newborn lambs and daffodils — comes spring- cleaning, house clearances and a spike in building activity. And that means fresh truckloads of rubbish heading for a roadside or a layby near you, much of it courtesy of professional criminal gangs.
Yet, as we shall see, the Government response to this disgusting problem is so shambolic and confusing that we find two neighbouring counties in the frontline offering diametrically opposed advice.
As the problem grows, with many public agencies preferring to toss responsibility back and forth, the chances of a prosecution — roughly one for every 450 incidents — seem to recede ever further.
So let us take a closer look at one textbook example of the fly-tipper’s work.
I turn off the A1 and head for Dyes Lane, where this eyesore stretches for 200 yards. Much of it is builders’ rubble. There are plenty of fridges, beds, skirting boards and chairs, too. There are bin liners full of cans, bin liners full of clothes. A cursory rummage shows one bundle of newspapers which date back to last year’s Tory leadership contest. Elsewhere, I find a Sunday paper from June 1997, for heaven’s sake.
In other words, this monumental Hertfordshire grot spot has been growing for at least 20 years.
SO WHAT on earth is going on? There are two clues. One is the household waste centre 400 yards down the road. No doubt, when some people find it closed, or are turned away for being in a commercial vehicle, or face petty restrictions, they simply come to dump their mess here. The other clue is the gipsy and traveller site at the end of the lane.
Most plots are neat and tidy, but one is filled to capacity with exactly the same sort of rubbish.
I talk to a lady hosing down her patch of concrete. She tells me people come from far and wide to dump rubbish in Dyes Lane, knowing it will be blamed on the travellers. ‘I’ve been telling the council about it for years,’ she says.
One obvious solution springs to mind: a CCTV camera.
At long last, though, things may be about to change.
For Hertfordshire is one part of the country that appears to be getting a grip on the problem, after a spate of brazen dumpings. Only last month, in another part of Hertfordshire, the fly-tipping gangs did not even bother to drop the waste at the side of the road. They simply tipped it in to the middle of the road late one afternoon and brought traffic to a standstill.
Now, instead of a hotchpotch approach, Hertfordshire has got its act together. The county council, all other local authorities and the police have pooled their resources to create a single fly-tipping body to share intelligence, data and kit. The number of incidents is already down, year- on-year, and detection is on the up.
Last week, two fly-tippers received suspended prison sentences and total fines of £ 1,500 after dumping mattresses, rubble and furniture in the middle of a road.
This week, the same duo had their Ford tipper truck crushed. Some will argue that they still got off too lightly, particularly since the mess they created cost £5,370 to clean up.
But it’s a move in the right direction. ‘There is little doubt that a segment of society has decided this is a good cash business — it’s lucrative and the chances of being caught are low,’ says Richard Thake, the county council’s cabinet member for waste management, who oversees the new Hertfordshire Fly Tipping Group. ‘That has to change.’
With a grant of £80,000 from the local police and crime commissioner, his group has plans for new CCTV cameras.
And last week, the same group gathered to deal with the mountain of mess near the A1 once and for all.
Stevenage Borough Council assures me it ‘will be removed in the near future’.
But while things may be improving in Hertfordshire, they appear to be getting worse over the border in Essex, where locals complain that the ‘trash mafia’ are terrorising the countryside.
For the truth is that with yet more onerous rules and costs for legitimate waste disposal, waste crime has never been more lucrative.
Some reports suggest it could be worth as much as £1 billion a year. Since penalties and detection rates are minimal, it’s a growth industry for the crime-lords.
Essex farmer Ed Ford has seen it all countless times. He tells me his neighbour has just found a gate smashed by a tipping gang who have left a vanload of mess.
Last October, though, Ed awoke to find several 20-ton mountains of recycled pulp on his 1,500-acre farm near Brentwood. Two days later, it happened again. But officialdom wasn’t interested.
‘I had to drive down to the council and bundle the environment officer into a car
and bring him here. He was expecting the odd washing machine. He couldn’t believe what he saw.’
The police’s reaction? ‘They weren’t interested. We’ve rather given up on them,’ says Ed, 26, who is also national chairman of the Young Farmers.
The clean-up cost him £8,000. He got some of the money back from his National Farmers’ Union insurance policy, but there was still a £1,500 excess and his premium will go up next year.
A month later, late at night, he caught a fly-tipping gang in action at a Brentwood parking spot.
‘I rang some friends who got straight down there,’ he says. ‘We were all calling 999 and trying to box them in, but when you’ve got a lorry about to ram you, it’s time to reverse out of the way.’ The police arrived 25 minutes later.
By then, the lorry and the white van acting as its patrol-car-cumescort had vanished. Both turned out to have fake number-plates and, though the tippers even left a skip behind, no one was caught.
Just another pile of filth for someone else to clear up and a tidy profit for the gang. Take a 20-ton load to a landfill site and it’ll cost you £2,000.
A spokesman for Essex Police says it has an ‘assisting role’ in dealing with fly-tipping complaints but that it is primarily an issue for the Environment Agency or the local authority.
The farmers acknowledge that part of the problem is a change in recycling rules at council waste depots (such as only one car bootfull of soil per month). But that’s no excuse for lawlessness.
What infuriates Ed Ford even more than the police response is the attitude of government.
He was cross when the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary, Andrea Leadsom, came to last month’s NFU conference and failed to mention fly-tipping in her speech. He was angrier when she was asked about it afterwards and referred to ‘litter policies’.
Fly-tipping is horrid for all of us. But it is particularly troublesome for landowners since they can be prosecuted for storing illegal waste even if it is nothing to with them.
The Country Land & Business Association (CLA), like the NFU, says this is now its members’ Number One gripe. CLA member Ralph Rayner, 45, woke up in June 2015 to find two tons of garage waste dumped on the family’s 2,000-acre farm near Dartmoor in Devon. He found evidence linking it to a garage in Torquay, and the dumper was duly identified. Then the council lost interest.
‘I probably had to nudge them 20 times and then go on local radio to get a prosecution going,’ he says.
Eventually, the fly-tipper was taken to court and fined £1,400.
Ralph, who had spent £ 500 clearing up the mess, did not receive a penny.
In the meantime, he had received a letter from his local council threatening him with prosecution for waste on another piece of land he owns next to Dartmoor. It’s a well-known beauty spot. For years, the public were allowed to park there. ‘But people kept dumping rubbish there at night. I put up a CCTV camera but it got stolen in two days. So now we have just dug a big trench across the entrance and sealed it off. It’s very sad.’
The problem is worse when tippers dump hazardous waste such as asbestos.
George Winn-Daley, who runs the Aldby Park Estate in Yorkshire, recently found an old asbestos shed chucked into his fields.
‘We had to spend hundreds of pounds getting it all doublewrapped and removed,’ he says. ‘There seems to be a cultural issue among a large number of people who think that this is almost acceptable behaviour.’
Of nearly one million fly-tipping cases in England last year, 315,000 were investigated, yet just 2,135 were brought to court, with an average fine of £370. With that sort of detection rate and that sort of penalty, it is hardly surprising that so many lazy people and criminals fancy their chances.
A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) points out that councils can now administer onthe-spot £400 fines which should make it easier for councils to crack down on minor offenders. But as the problem increases, what can the rest of us do? That, absurdly, depends where you live.
Let us return to those fly-tipping heartlands just outside London.
According to Essex Police, people should report illegal tipping to the Environment Agency via a National Incident Control Centre.
To test this, I contact them and am diverted to a ‘pollution incident hotline’ in Scotland, to be told it doesn’t cover England. After ten minutes I’m put through to someone in Sheffield who tells me the Essex Police advice is wrong. ‘You only call us if it’s a load of more than 20 tons,’ he said.
So what do I do if I see a Transit van offloading rubble into an Essex water meadow?
‘You should call 101,’ I’m told.
ACCORDING to the Government’s website, however, unless you see ‘large-scale illegal dumping (such as lorries)’, you should contact your local council.
I think we all know this will not work after 5pm on a weekday, let alone at weekends. So far, so useless. However, the guidance in Essex’s neighbouring county is completely different. Hertfordshire Constabulary declares that it is ‘committed to tackling fly-tipping’ and doesn’t prevaricate.
‘ If you see fly- tipping in progress,’ says its website, ‘then please dial 999 immediately.’ That’s more like it, surely. Allison Ogden-Newton, head of the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, says that ‘ more leadership’ is needed. But we all need to do our bit, too. She points out that if your waste is fly-tipped and traced back to you, then you are just as liable to be prosecuted as the crook who dumps it.
‘ The problem is the rise of the criminal fly-tipper but people must understand that it is also a crime not to care. If your old sofa ends up in a farmer’s field, you haven’t tried very hard, have you?’ Essex County Council say the solution is some sort of trash tsar to fight the trash mafia.
‘We would like to see the formation of one agency with the resources and authority to prosecute,’ says Simon Walsh, cabinet member for waste.
His opposite number in Hertfordshire, Richard Thake, says powers already exist and his authorities are determined to use them. For now, it would seem to be working, although there is still a long way to go.
Perhaps, instead of confusing us all with flabby and contradictory advice, ministers should take a short trip up the A1 to Hertfordshire and see what happens when you stop dealing with fly-tipping as ‘litter’ and recognise it for what it is: a serious crime that is blighting Britain.
DO YOU have photos of fly-tipping blighting your area? If so, send them with details to flytipping@dailymail.co.uk.