ANALYSIS PETER JOHN MEIKLEM

You don’t have to walk far in the city or countryside to come face-to-face with a gutted kitchen or an abandoned mattress.

While lockdown brought people into the countryside, and on city strolls, in record numbers it has also led to a very visible fly-tipping plague.

The pandemic’s perfect storm of tip closures, followed by heavily restricted opening hours at dumps and recycling centres, seems to have made a bad situation worse for people in town, city and countryside alike.

The figures in Perth and Kinross reveal the extent of a growing problem.

The number of incidents reported to the council has more than doubled since 2015, growing from 523 in 2015 to 1141 in 2019.

And the pandemic effect? Cases spiralled to 1384 between March and November last year in Perth and Kinross. It is a similarly frustrating tale in both Angus and Fife.

In Angus, 372 reports in 2015 grew to 575 by 2019.

Communities in the kingdom are the worst affected. Fifers made a whopping 4,014 reports in 2019 – up on 3,208 in 2016.

But figures from Dundee tell a slightly different story.

The problem appears to be falling away in the city with a high of 1,494 cases in 2016/17 dropping to 1,118 in 2019/19. Between March and November last year Dundonians reported 655 incidents.

Worryingly, these figures may not capture the whole of the messy picture.

Arguments over who is responsible for cleaning up the mess – especially if the waste is dumped on private land – can deter people from making reports.

Rubbish can be left to fester for days and weeks while those affected argue the toss over cleaning it up.

And all the while the dumb – or perhaps not so dumb – dumpers prepare to leave another load of unsightly garbage for other people to clean up.

Another pile of unsightly rubbish is dumped.