Revealed - town halls fining fewer litter louts
NUMBER OF PENALTIES ISSUED IS DOWN BY MORE THAN A QUARTER
FINES for littering dropped by more than a quarter in Greater Manchester last year.
Exclusive data shows a 27 per cent fall in the number of fixed penalty notices handed out by councils across the region to people for dropping rubbish.
The figures have been revealed as part of InYourArea.co.uk’s Don’t Trash Our Future campaign - launched in summer last year, it aims to address the epidemic of littering in the UK.
A survey conducted then, of more than 7,500 people, found 85pc saw litter as a big or major issue in their area, and almost two-thirds (64pc) thought levels got worse as lockdown restriction eased.
In 2019, 18,179 fines were issued across Greater Manchester but last year that dropped to 13,241, according to Freedom of Information requests to the councils in the area. However, there was a wide variation in the number of fines issued by different councils. In Stockport, there were no fixed penalty notices issued in 2020, compared to one in 2019, while in Manchester, 11,730 were issued in 2020, down from 15,522 in 2019.
It’s a criminal offence for a person to drop, throw down, leave or deposit litter in a public place. It carries a maximum fine of £2,500 and can be tried in a magistrate’s court.
Councils, or enforcement agents working on their behalf, can issue fixed penalty notice with a fine of up to £100 (with discounts for paying quickly) instead of taking people to court. Failure to pay can lead to court proceedings for littering being started.
With the number of fines being issued dropping, so has the amount of money paid in fines – 8,790 fixed penalty notices paid across Greater Manchester last year totalled £811,825, down from £1.1m in 2019.
There were also fewer cases prosecuted as a result of littering, or because the person failed to pay the fine instead. In 2020, there were 848 prosecutions, down from 1,674 in 2019.
The pandemic also hit efforts to tackle litterers through the courts, with councils pointing to case backlogs and delays.
Coun David Renard, environment spokesperson for the Local Government Association, said: “Each council has to decide the best way to tackle litter in their individual communities, but whilst we recognise that responses have to be proportionate, measures must be robust enough to tackle abuse of the local environment.”
The drop in the number of fixed penalty notices being issued also led to a fall in the amount of money collected from fines - down from £11.3m in 2019 to £7.2m in 2020.
John Read, founder of Clean Up Britain, said: “Councils often talk about responses to littering being ‘proportionate.’ They miss the point completely I’m afraid.”
“A £100 fine is not proportionate, it’s pathetic.”