FLY-TIPPING EPIDEMIC
Britain is being blighted by a sudden surge in fly-tipping. And the cause? Penny pinching councils making it so complicated and expensive to get rid of our rubbish
THE sun high in the summer sky, birdsong filling the air and corn swaying in the gentle breeze. A bucolic rural scene. And all ruined by the idiot in the foreground. Dressed in floral Bermuda shorts, grubby T- shirt and sporting a selfsatisfied smirk, this is Richard Weston.
As the photograph (right) shows, he was caught on camera visiting a beauty spot in Derbyshire. But not to enjoy the view.
Instead he had gone there to dispose of the remains of a dishwasher — removing it from the back of his blue Renault Clio and then slinging it into the hedgerow.
And it wasn’t the first time he had made the ten-mile round trip.
On no fewer than eight occasions Weston, who made a living stripping electrical parts from white goods, travelled there to dispose of his unwanted waste.
Had he not been caught red-handed by a camera hidden by the local council in the undergrowth he would no doubt have continued to use it as a tip to this day.
The 38-year-old had no choice but to plead guilty at South Derbyshire magistrates’ court last week and was ordered to pay £1,200 in a fine and costs.
Nevertheless, he still attempted to excuse his actions by claiming that by dumping the items in August last year he hoped they would come to the attention of passing scrap metal merchants who would then recycle them.
As mitigation goes it was particularly hopeless. But it gives some insight into the mentality of the nation’s growing band of litter louts.
Because from urban back streets to rural beauty spots, Britain’s green and pleasant land is being blighted by a plague of fly-tippers.
Over the past two years, the number of reported incidents of fly-tipping has increased by more than 27 per cent — that’s 900,000 incidents in 2014/2015.
As for what is dumped, the majority is household waste — black sacks and material from house or shed clearances, old furniture, carpets and the like. This made up two-thirds of all incidents last year, one for every 40 households in England.
SO WHY, after a steady decline in fly-tipping in recent years, has it suddenly returned? Why, in short, are we turning Britain into a tip? Many believe that local councils — who are supposed to be responsible for disposing of our rubbish — are actually to blame for the huge surge in fly-tipping.
Across the country they’re imposing new restrictions on household refuse, including the introduction of collections only every third week in some areas.
Others have made recycling even more complicated, rationing the amount of waste they will remove or bringing in fees for one-off pick-ups. Charges are now routinely levied at tips for the disposal of items such as glass, soil, rubble and plasterboard.
‘There is a a massive problem,’ says Richard McIlwain, deputy chief executive of the charity Keep Britain Tidy. ‘There is an element where it is getting out of control and I don’t think the cutbacks and the closure of some household waste centres and all the rules and permits really help.
‘You have got to make it easy for householders to do the right thing. If you make it really hard, there will be a proportion of people who, say, get to the tip and get turned away because they don’t have the right permit and who will pop it outside the gates or down a quiet street.
‘It’s not right, but too many rules and regulations don’t help.’
Anyone who has tried to arrange to have so-called bulky items collected by the council will be aware of the hoops they have to jump through. Bookings and payments often can only be made online, with a long and complicated list of exclusions.
Homeowners are expected to have the item placed outside the property at the crack of dawn on the day of collection.
Of course, ultimately it is the responsibility of individuals to dispose of their waste legally. But if they do not, then in most cases the burden of clearing it up will fall on local councils, with the cost borne by the taxpayer.
This is because most flytipping occurs on public land.
The most common place is beside roads and highways — 48 per cent of all incidents last year. Footpaths, bridleways and back alleyways featured in a further 28 per cent of cases. The estimated cost of clearing flytipped rubbish to local authori- ties in England was nearly £ 50 million, an 11 per cent increase on 2013/14.
The trouble is that simply clearing away the rubbish does not address the root cause of the problem, as homeowners around Britain know to their cost.
FOR instance, Ashley Reay, a 66-year-old coach with the Rugby Football Union, lives in a quiet culde-sac bordered by rolling farmland on the outskirts of Frome, Somerset. But his hopes of enjoying the rural life have been blighted for years by fly-tipping on a nearby lane. He used to run along it to keep fit. But now so much waste has accumulated there it is almost impossible to negotiate.
Today it is strewn with mountains of rubble, huge piles of garden waste, fridges and televisions. To add insult to injury, signs warning people they face prosecution for fly-tipping have been torn down and thrown into the hedgerows.
‘I used to run along the lane but I fell over a metal box one evening at dusk and injured my leg quite badly,’ says Mr Reay.
‘I’ve also had numerous punctures on my bike. It’s used by dog walkers and mums with pushchairs. So it’s only a matter of time before an animal or a child is badly hurt — and then there will be hell to pay.’
He believes that the location of the road — it is called Gypsy Lane — on the edge of the town is part of the reason it’s targeted. ‘I think it’s people coming out from town and taking the first opportunity to ditch what they can’t be bothered to take to the tip,’ he says.
Others blame the proximity of a local travellers’ site.
‘ If you want to load up a Transit with soil or hardcore, for example, it will cost you something like £50 or £100 to take that to the tip,’ said Andrew Knight, chair of neigh-
bouring Berkley Parish Council. ‘If you’re a white van man working for cash then why bother? On one occasion, Mendip District Council put up two cameras, but they were stolen within 24 hours.
‘I’m not convinced there is the will to tackle this. You wonder sometimes if it’s easier for the council to have stuff fly-tipped in one place because it’s easier to clear up.
‘But why should people who live in our village have to put up with this mess? And why should the council taxpayers foot the bill?’ And what a bill it is. A Freedom of Information Act request by Mr Reay revealed that the total cost of cleaning up the lane over the past two years was £98,639.27. That works out at £135 per day, every day.
‘Surely it’s got to be cheaper to stop people doing it in the first place,’ he says.
But how to stop them? In a sign of how desperate the situation has become, the council plans to shut the lane off for 18 months.
A spokesman said that as well as limiting opportunities for fly-tippers it would simplify surveillance.
Asked why the problem had become so acute, he added: ‘The growing incidence of fly-tipping nationally is clearly linked to the increasing costs associated with waste disposal at landfill sites and it also reflects the increasing complexity associated with obtaining permits and licences to dispose of certain hazardous materials such as asbestos and plasterboard.’
CATCHING culprits in the act of fly-tipping is not easy — although it has been helped by the use of hidden cameras and other technology. But even if caught, fly- tippers face minimal sanctions.
As figures from last year show, about 500,000 of the 900,000 flytipping incidents were investigated, with the most common follow-up action a warning letter.
But there were just 1,810 prosecutions — down from 2,815 in 2012. Of those, 98 per cent resulted in a conviction with 82 per cent getting fined. Just 21 prosecutions ended in a custodial sentence.
Keep Britain Tidy’s Mr McIlwain believes it is time courts got tougher. ‘We would really challenge magistrates to take these offences seriously. But I understand 90 per cent of the fines issued are less than £1,000,’ he says. ‘If you are a serial fly-tipper you build that into your bottom line because probably you make more than that in a week.’
And that is a real issue. Of all the incidents, one third involve the dumping of a ‘van load’ of rubbish, more often than not comprising household waste.
This suggests homeowners are paying to have their waste removed by contractors who then fly-tip it rather than pay to have it properly disposed of.
Few will be aware that anyone paying to have waste taken away by a third party is responsible for where it ends up.
They should check their contractor has a Waste Carrier Licence. If they don’t and the rubbish is fly-tipped, the customer could be fined up to £5,000.
The lengths to which cowboy contractors will go was graphi- cally highlighted last week by CCTV footage of an incident in a quiet back street in Croydon.
Recorded on a camera erected by fed-up local resident Caroline Kohn, it showed a Ford Transit tipper truck approaching a row of garages in broad daylight.
Without even stopping, the driver dumped three tonnes of building waste onto the road.
It was the third time since February that waste had been dumped in the same spot.
‘On one of the previous occasions when the man dropped off his waste we weren’t able to get our car out of the drive,’ said Mrs Kohn, a 51-year-old mother-of-four who works as an accounts manager. ‘The worry is that you don’t know what is in it — but he obviously doesn’t care.’
Mrs Kohn handed the footage to Croydon council who found the vehicle, half full of waste.
They believe it had been used for fly-tipping many times across the area. But because it was unregistered they have not yet tracked down the driver or owner.
And it’s not only councils who are left to clean up after the flytippers. Private landowners also have a responsibility to clear waste dumped on their land.
Jason Coad, 53, farms 180 acres of land near Bodmin, Cornwall, and is regularly targeted.
‘We often have garden waste and boot loads of rubble dumped in gateways and hedges,’ he says. ‘But about a year ago, we had 1,000 tyres dumped in a field we had just harvested.’
WHILE his council said it would help him remove them, it wanted to charge him £2 per tyre. In the end, a neighbouring dairy farmer offered to take the tyres to weigh down plastic sheets covering a heap of silage.
Mr Coad thought the culprits were builders trying to avoid charges at the tip just two miles away. The council recently introduced a charging system at its household waste recycling centres for ‘non household’ items of waste such as tyres and rubble.
Meanwhile, efforts to clamp down on the fly-tippers continue. From next month, councils can issue fixed penalty notices on fly-tippers. If they refuse to pay a fine of up to £400 they will be prosecuted.
For their part, some councils claim that the increase in fly-tipping may be partly to do with greater reporting of the issue.
And the Local government Association is calling for more industries to offer ‘take back’ schemes — removing, say, an old mattress, television or dishwasher when someone buys a new one.
As LGA spokesman Martin Tett puts it: ‘not only does flytipping create an eyesore for residents, it is also a serious public health risk, creating pollution and attracting rats and other vermin.’
A word some would no doubt be tempted to use to describe those — like Mr Weston — who are willing to despoil the beautiful British countryside.