By Louise Atkinson

FLY-TIPPING is a blight on our countryside, a serious risk to wildlife and human health, and costs the taxpayer more than £58 million a year. There is nothing more infuriatingly selfish — and the problem is getting worse, with offences rising by more than 7 per cent a year. It carries the threat of a fixed-penalty fine of up to £400, or a prison sentence for repeat offenders. But fly-tippers have become increasingly sophisticated and, to those trying to stop them, most get away scot-free.

Sometimes eyesores can be dealt with by altruistic community clean-up crews, such as the 200,000-plus members of the public and school volunteers taking part in the Mail-backed Great British Spring Clean, which runs from March 22 to April 23 (see below left for how to sign up).

But catching fly-tippers is the job of community enforcement officers, who are working harder than ever in the face of government cutbacks.

Here, Alastair Jenkins, an enforcement officer with Walsall Council, in the West Midlands, shares the diary of his daily battles to bring the perpetrators of this shameful crime to justice.

MONDAY: A GAME OF CAT AND MOUSE

IT HAS been another busy weekend for fly-tippers and I arrive to work to find an inbox full of complaints.

Our four- strong enforcement team handle antisocial behaviour, environmental crime, licensing, statutory nuisance and ‘unauthorised encampments’. Fly-tipping is just part of my job — but it’s taking up more and more time and becoming an obsession.

I took this job 11 years ago after 15 years in the police, as I wanted to make a visible difference to the beautiful countryside around here — but it is immensely frustrating.

Walsall spends £750,000 a year on clearing up fly-tipping, and we have hidden cameras at hotspots such as lay-bys, dead-end roads and patches of wasteland. The cameras are triggered by activity or movement, and most weeks we get about five bits of clear footage. You’d be surprised how many people are oblivious to the bright yellow ‘CCTV in operation’ signs we are obliged by law to put up.

Some of the footage is comical. You see young lads pulling washing machines out of a van straight onto their feet, then hopping around nursing their toes, or builders dumping waste willy-nilly on a layby, then meticulous folding their sacks and stacking buckets to put back in their vans.

One memorable conviction was of a gang of serial fly-tippers who had been operating right under our noses. CCTV showed them emptying their bags of waste, furniture and mattresses in such a rush that one of them was hit on the head by a bag thrown by his mate. The courts sent him to prison for six months, with a two-year driving ban.

But sadly, successful convictions are few and far between.

In one unsolved case, residents of an affluent suburb heard clattering noises in the night. In the morning they were appalled to see their immaculate verges strewn with bits of broken furniture and old carpets spread across the entire length and breadth of their estate.

At 2am, a pick-up truck had turned in off the main road, dropped its tailgate and lurched through the crescent, scattering its full load of rubbish before speeding off into the night. The driver couldn’t be identified.

Often, number plates are obscured (some fly-tippers remove them, empty their load, then drive out of camera range and replace them) or doctored. It is common to see tape stuck on a letter F to make it look like an E, for instance, or to find that the plates are false.

If we identify a fly-tipper, we have to write inviting them to come in for an interview. When we don’t hear from them, we’ll do a door-knock and try to personally invite them for interview. That rarely works, either.

We have been able to gather enough evidence to issue about 20 fixed penalty fines in the past 18 months. Three still haven’t paid and we will be taking those cases to court. We are continually frustrated by our lack of ‘teeth’ and it is disheartening when the community criticises us for ‘doing nothing’.

To try to get on top of the problem, we are trialling initiatives such as extending the opening hours at local tips and offering free skips in designated locations to try to encourage people to get rid of their waste more responsibly.

We will soon also have the right to immediately seize a vehicle we suspect of being involved in fly-tipping. We just tell them, if you want the vehicle back, you have to talk to us.

We’d love to be able to get these people convicted but in taking a case to court, our hands are often tied. Every piece of evidence has to be absolutely watertight, and ensuring that is the case can cost up to £1,000.

TUESDAY: WALSALL’S MOST WANTED

I GET a call about a fresh dump of rubbish at our most notorious spot — the open space in a run-down part of town called Goscote Lodge Crescent. It’s a fly- tipper’s paradise — easy access, loads of space and no one around to see what you’re up to.

Even though there are cameras in the area, virtually every morning there is a fresh fly- tipping incident there. Yesterday it was fridges — 20 of them. Today it’s huge wooden reels that must have once spooled copper cable.

The council clean-up crew are always on the lookout and usually arrive within 24 hours with a grabber on the back of a truck to cart the rubbish away before opportunists can add to the pile.

I drive out quickly to sift for evidence (receipts, bills or prescriptions that might hint where the tippers came from). You have to be quick before wind and rain scatters or ruins paperwork. By law, the person named on anything found is culpable but they are rarely responsible for the actual fly-tipping.

There is a Birmingham address on a receipt, so I run it through the police team when I get back to the office. Fly-tipping is very often bundled up with a whole raft of criminal activity.

The giant reels dumped at Goscote Lodge Crescent probably held cabling that has been stolen, so fly-tipping is merely the grubby end of the process.

Sometimes we are told to back down or warned not to attempt a door-knock without police back-up — none of us wants to walk right into a snake pit.

WEDNESDAY: THE WHITE VAN MEN

WE HEAd for a car park in Willenhall for one of our monthly community protection events with the local police.

Over the years we have built up a profile of the classic fly-tipper’s vehicle: a white Transit-type van, 12-15 years old, usually in a scruffy state, with no branding or livery. So today we’ve got the police flagging down any vans that fit that brief and directing them towards us. Of the 12 pulled over, 11 are carrying house clearance and scrap and none of the drivers will say where they got it from or where they are taking it.

Obviously we can’t convict anyone merely for carrying scrap, but this is an opportunity to warn the drivers about our CCTV cameras and tell them what they should be doing with rubbish. It means we have their details on file and if the number plates come up later, they can’t claim innocence if caught.

Some local authorities slap stickers that read ‘illegally dumped rubbish under investigation’ on abandoned fridges, or swathe them in crime-scene