Clearing up after fly-tippers cost our council £100,000
Dumping rubbish in borough goes up by 22%
Maidstone Borough Council spent almost £100,000 last year picking up fly-tipped waste, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has estimated.
Council staff went to 973 incidents in 2016/17, which was an increase of 22% on the previous year. This was despite Maidstone having its own free-touse household waste recycling centre in Burial Ground Lane, Tovil.
Every time someone dumped their rubbish in a country lane instead of taking it to the tip, it cost the borough on average £99.15 to clear it up, according to Defra, which used an industry standard measure based on the size of the collection. It allows £7 to pick up a single sack of waste, and £115 for a van-sized load.
Just across the border in Tonbridge and Malling, the picture was very different.
There the borough suffered only 648 incidents of fly-tipping – the lowest of any authority in Kent.
It spent just £31,158 picking the rubbish up, which at an average cost of £48.08 a time was less than half that of Maidstone, indicating that where residents or businesses had dumped rubbish it was usually a smaller quantity than in Maidstone.
Responding to their apparent low incidence of fly-tipping, a spokesman for Tonbridge and Malling council said: “We have cleared some fly-tips as part of our scheduled cleansing regime rather than having to use a separate resource each time, whereas other councils may have a dedicated resource to deal specifically with fly-tips.”
Tunbridge Wells also did well, with only 704 incidents of fly-tipping, barely changed from the year before. It spent an average of £89.98 collecting each dumped load. Elsewhere across the county, Medway had the worst fly-tippers, with 3,637 incidents, and spent the most picking it up – £252,327. The figures only account for fly-tipping on public land. Farmers and private landowners have to meet the cost of clearing up after fly-tippers themselves.