ON-THE-SPOT £400 FINES FOR DUMPING YOUR LITTER

New crackdown on scourge of fly-tipping

HOUSEHOLDERS who have their rubbish dumped illegally face spot fines of £400.

The crackdown is aimed at discouraging families from using rogue ‘man with a van’ outfits to get rid of their waste. The number of flytipping incidents last year surged 7 per cent to more than one million. Two thirds involved household waste.

The new fixedpenalty notices of up to £400 will be introduced this autumn. It is already illegal to allow an unauthorised person to remove your rubbish but councils rarely prosecute because of the high cost of court cases. The option of spot fines will make it easier for town halls to take action.

Announcing the move last night, environment minister Therese Coffey said she was ‘determined to stamp out an antisocial crime that blighted the countryside and our streets’.

She said that it was a question of

enforcing existing legislation rather than ‘duffing up victims’.

Whitehall sources said councils would not be allowed to use the fines ‘simply as a means of raising money’.

Officials are examining what proof householders will need to show they have acted properly if their rubbish is later found to have been fly-tipped.

This is likely to include producing a receipt from a licensed waste operator for the removal of the rubbish concerned.

Sources said the move was designed to stop the use of unlicensed operators, who charge around £115 to remove a van load of rubbish, compared with £190 for a licensed tradesman.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it would provide guidance on how the fixed penalties should be issued.

The move comes amid growing public concern about litter, as show by public support for the Daily Mail’s Great Plastic Pick Up campaign, which has already seen 7,330 readers sign up to join 315 community litter-picking events next month.

Earlier this month, the Government announced the introduction of £150 on-thespot fines for litter louts – almost double the previous £80 level.

Councils were also given new powers to prosecute vehicle owners who allow passengers to throw rubbish out of the window.

The new fly-tipping fines are part of a package of measures to tackle the scourge.

Ministers will encourage councils to use their existing powers to track down and prosecute offenders. Miss Coffey said many authorities were turning a blind eye to flytipping, with ‘only about half actively trying to tackle the issue’.

Town halls will be urged to scrap charges for disposing of bulky items such as waste from DIY projects.

The Ministry of Justice is considering increasing the maximum sentence for individuals caught fly-tipping – existing fixedpenalty notices can be as low as £150.

And the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is being asked to increase co-operation with local authorities trying to trace flytippers caught on CCTV. Miss Coffey is in talks with police chiefs about prioritising the issue because it is often linked to organised crime.

The moves follow calls from MPs this week to do more on fly-tipping.

Neil Parish, the Tory MP who chairs the Commons environment committee, said flytipping was ‘not a victimless crime’, with taxpayers billed £58million for cleaning up rubbish dumped on public land last year. Private landowners are also left out of pocket.

Mr Parish said it was clear that the existing enforcement regime was not working. He called for a major increase in the level of fines, saying they needed to be ‘more severe so that they act as a real deterrent’.

Commercial organisations caught fly-tipping face fines of up to £50,000.

Mr Parish called on councils to reduce, or even scrap, their charges for removing white goods such as fridges, saying it would ‘take away some of the incentive to fly-tip in the first place’.

Fellow Conservative MP Julia Lopez, who represents Hornchurch and Upminster, suggested that ‘well-intended changes have made waste disposal so expensive that people are cutting corners’.

She urged the police to step up action, saying that much fly-tipping was ‘now carried out by serious organised criminal gangs, not just casual chancers’.

She added: ‘Those gangs use false plates and stolen trucks, so traditional means of combating fly-tipping, such as CCTV, are not effective. Increased penalties might help, but we may well need to go further.’

Another Conservative MP, Eddie Hughes, called for council tips to be kept open longer to make it easier for people to dispose of their rubbish.

Mr Hughes said that during a recent clean-up, his local council in Walsall had collected 108 fridges from the streets in a single day. j.groves@dailymail.co.uk

‘This is not a victimless crime’