Town one of biggest fly-tipping hotspots
ROCHDALE is one of the biggest fly-tipping hotspots in England, with more than 10 incidents every day on average.
Data released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has revealed that there were 4,219 fly-tipping incidents in Rochdale in the 12 months to March 2018, one of the highest numbers of any local authority in England.
This was an increase of 39 per cent from five years ago, when there were 3,034.
Coun Neil Emmott, the council’s cabinet member for environment, said fly-tipping ‘shows an absolute lack of respect for the borough in which we live.’
“It is a nationwide issue that is a burden on councils and council tax payers,” he added.
“I find it hard to believe that some people still think they can get away with it. It leaves council tax payers to pick up the bill for clean-up costs and this just isn’t acceptable.
“In the last year we’ve trained a specialised team to investigate and remove fly-tipped waste and introduced technology to allow us to gather evidence quicker and more efficiently. This has given enforcement officers more time to investigate and take action against those responsible.
“We’ve a zero-tolerance approach to fly-tipping. Since January we’ve taken action on 32 people and gained 33 convictions, costing those responsible more than £16,000 in imposed penalties for environmental crimes, up from just four in 2017.
“These figures show that our tough actions to crack down on fly-tipping are delivering results and this is a message we want to get out to those responsible.”
According to DEFRA, fly-tipping in Rochdale most commonly involved volumes of waste equivalent of a small van load.
However, the area is also seeing increasing numbers of large-scale tips, involving a lorry load of rubbish or more.
The most common type of waste dumped in Rochdale was household waste, which accounted for 1,555 incidents, followed by black bags of household rubbish and white goods such as fridges or washing machines. Waste was most commonly dumped on council land.
Clearing up the rubbish and taking action against perpetrators is estimated to have cost the council around £286,400 last year.
Anyone with information about fly-tipping or those responsible can report it by calling 0300 303 8884 or at rochdale.gov.uk/ flytipping.