A senior Sefton councillor has said fly-tipping action in the borough “needs to improve” after a “disappointing” lack of enforcement.
Cabinet member Cllr Paulette Lappin made the remarks at a meeting of Sefton Council’s regeneration and skills scrutiny committee held yesterday, March 7.
Providing an update on the effectiveness of the council’s enforcement strategy, Cllr Lappin referred to a recent ECHO report following an FOI submitted by Green campaigner and candidate Neil Doolin which revealed only five fines had been issued for fly-tipping across the whole of the borough last year.
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She said: “Also with the amount of queries we receive and unfortunate lack of success relating to enforcement it is not something that we are remotely pleased about.
“We are currently reviewing the structures within the enforcement department and looking at how we’ll procure a new enforcement contract and hopefully where we can actually follow it through.”
Committee chair Cllr Liz Dowd said: “The report indicates that currently the enforcement contract is a kind of dual contract that enforces both parking and littering and fly-tipping.
“I would suggest that those things need to be separated, it’s quite clear from the number of enforcement prosecution and notices issued that that is very disappointing.
“I think it’s very difficult to have somebody out enforcing littering and car parking at the same time, and would also suggest that probably the enforcement of car parking takes priority and so the teams are only enforcing littering where there is car parking, when we all know that actually littering and fly tipping isn’t around our car parking sites, it tends to be much broader.”
Cllr Lappin said: “I take the suggestion relating to enforcement, it is much harder to enforce littering and fly-tipping.
“What is often difficult is that once something is reported as fly-tipped the cleansing department is requested to remove it and they just go and remove it as nobody wants to see what’s tipped in front of them.
“If we leave it longer it means people are left looking at eyesore so it’s a very difficult balance to strike between it in lots of ways.
“That is quite difficult and of course, the budgetary position hasn’t helped us at all in any way shape or form as this is fundamentally subject to a great deal of cuts.
“We do need to improve the way we enforce fly-tipping.”
Plans to tender for a new contract for parking and littering enforcement are due to be discussed tomorrow, March 9 at a meeting of Sefton’s cabinet, where members will be asked to approve recommendations to “invite tenders for the provision of a parking and environmental enforcement, cash collection and car park management service.”
According to the cabinet report, the tender will be broken down into a “variety of lots offering different service levels” and the new contracts are anticipated to remain within the “current approved budget position.”
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