Fly-tipping must be investigated more
REGULAR readers of the Hinckley Times will be aware of the increasingly frequent (practically weekly), reports of major episodes of socalled “fly-tipping” - the illegal dumping of assorted waste throughout the borough and the countryside more generally.
Mostly on roadside verges or on private land, but sometimes on the carriageways themselves, the deposited materials constitute environmental and often health hazards, in addition to a vast financial burden on the local authorities to whom the responsibility falls for subsequent clearance and disposal.
Nationally, this accounts for hundreds of millions of pounds in ratepayers’ contributions, which could otherwise be spent much more productively.
Requests for information accompanying these reports are invariably generated by local councils, suggesting that the responsibility for investigating these crimes also devolves to the local authority in whose territory the dumping occurs. This may lead some readers to suppose that the offence is only an infringement of local by-laws and does not involve the police.
This is not the case. Fly-tipping is a serious criminal offence and the law provides for penalties up to and including imprisonment and heavy fines if the crime is referred to a higher court. Case reports, however, suggest that this is very rarely the case and indicate little evidence of active police commitment to tackling the issue.
Take, for example, the front page picture and article in a recent edition of the Times. The photograph showing a huge pile of broken concrete with fragments weighing over a ton clearly indicates that this was no everyday “man with a van” episode, but involved spoil from a civil engineering site requiring massive demolition machinery, as well as heavy lifting and transport vehicles. The likely sources of such waste must be very few and far between at any given time and almost certainly will have required some form of planning permission.
One imagines that, given sufficient motivation and average competence, the county police force would have been able to narrow down and hopefully identify the origin of the dumped material quite quickly, and a successful prosecution might have resulted. The report, however, contains no information to encourage such a belief.
Until those responsible for law enforcement - both police and judiciary - take this growing problem more seriously I fear there is little prospect of seeing a downturn in the scourge of fly-tipping, either locally or nationally.
A.Y., Burbage.