Rubbish: how to tip the balance
RARELY does a day pass without seeing ugly mounds of illegally tipped rubbish: tyres, old washing machines, carpets, furniture, even toxic materials,’ comments Countryfile presenter John Craven, who has spoken out about fly-tipping in this country, which he claims has reached ‘epidemic’ levels. ‘It’s distressing, harmful to Nature, criminal and shows no sign of abating.’
The number of incidents is up for the third year in a row, with nearly a million cases reported last year, at a £600 million burden to the taxpayer. The Woodland Trust, for example, had a particularly bad 2016, with a clean-up bill of £162,000 and only one fly-tipper successfully prosecuted.
Penalty charges for owners of cars people throw rubbish out of and on-the-spot fines for litterers are among the measures introduced by Defra earlier this year as part of the Government’s first Litter Strategy for England (Town & Country, April 19), which also involves working with Highways England to target the 25 worst litter hotspots on our road network. The public consultation on these measures concluded in June and Defra is now examining the results.
Meanwhile, the CLA has been working with Farmers Weekly to discover the extent of the problem. Their survey found that fly-tipping now affects almost two-thirds of private landowners and 85% have had to take measures to protect their land (barriers, CCTV and so on). Most victims are targeted two to three times a month and each incident costs an average of £844 to clean up, which can add up to more than £30,000 a year. However, out of 936,000 flytipping incidents in 2015/2016, only 129 vehicles were seized and out of 2,135 prosecutions, only 77 fines of more than £1,000 were imposed, according to Defra.
The CLA has now put forward a five-point plan of action; recommendations include appointing a ‘Fly-tipping Tsar’ to coordinate with national agencies, fines for home and business owners whose waste is found in fly-tipped locations, developing new ways to clear up and support victims so that private landowners are not liable, educating the public on the problem and seizing vehicles.
‘Private landowners are fed up of clearing away other people’s rubbish and paying for the privilege,’ says CLA President Ross Murray. ‘If they don’t act, they risk prosecution for illegal storage of waste, which is simply not fair.’
‘At the moment, it’s more expensive for the victim to remove the fly-tipped waste than the fixed-penalty notice, as more than 80% of these are for £500 or less,’ adds East Yorkshire landowner George Winn-darley, whose Aldby Park country estate suffers from multiple incidents of fly-tipping each year. ‘Judging by the marked increase in fly-tipping, fixed-penalty notices are really ineffective. Local authorities need to crack down hard by increasing fines, seizing vehicles and even imprisoning offenders.’