A tsunami of fly tipping has been sweeping the North, with a spike in cases during the pandemic accelerating a trend that has been creeping up for years.
Eddy Edwards, from Moss Side, has been shocked at the amount of rubbish being dumped in his alleyway since moving into his house in 2019. Speaking to Annie Gouk on the latest episode of The North in Numbers, he said: “It was unbelievable the amount of trash that was there - anything and everything that could be chucked out the house was piling up, and it would just keep on happening.
“It’s continually getting worse. If nobody in the area was reporting the fly tipping going on, it would continue to mount up in the streets. In our area there’s probably about 10 people regularly reporting, I’m talking daily - fridges, oversized bins, cars, anything getting left out. If people weren’t so on it, it would get even worse. But it is still incredibly bad.”
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The latest figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs reveal nearly 310,000 incidents of fly-tipping were recorded by councils across the North in 2020/21 - the equivalent of 35 every hour. That’s up 15% from fewer than 270,000 reports of illegally-dumped rubbish in 2019/20, with the increase linked to lockdown.
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With not much else to keep us occupied, many people spent their time working on their gardens, decluttering their homes, and doing DIY. At the same time, council services were very stretched, affecting tips and bulky waste collections, and charity shops were closed.
Steve Beasant, Councillor for the East Marsh ward in North East Lincolnshire, said: “It started with the pandemic - people not going out so much, so they’re just dumping it at the closest possible point.
“It’s horrific some weekends. I go round on my pushbike spotting all the fly tipping and getting it all reported, and I can report as many as 40, 50 or even 60 lots of fly tipping in a weekend. The council staff are absolutely brilliant in the fact that they quickly pick it up, but then within days it’s back again.
“Alleyways are a massive problem in East Marsh - I know alleyways with potentially about 20 tonnes of fly tipping, and in my opinion those alleyways are becoming a health and safety hazard. They’re also becoming a public health hazard. There’s one lady I know really well, she’s catching about three or four rats every single week and it’s coming from the alleyway. It is absolutely horrendous.”
However, while things have gotten particularly bad during the pandemic, there was already a trend over the last decade or so of incidents of fly tipping slowly increasing.
It’s something Dave Himelfield has noticed in his neighbourhood. Speaking on the podcast, he said: “I live in a semi-rural area on the Lancashire and West Yorkshire border which has been blighted by fly tipping.
“On main routes across the Pennines, which are still fairly quiet, it’s a real problem. For example on the A58 past Blackstone Edge you’ll see tires, old furniture, building waste and other junk dumped every few 100 metres.
“It has been markedly worse since Cameron and Osbourne’s policy of austerity saw council budgets slashed, and it’s not got any better since. I presume it’s because councils have had to cut back on refuse collection and disposal services. Less frequent general waste collections, limits on tip visits and charging to get rid of household DIY can’t have helped - not that it excuses fly tipping, ever.”
As Mr Himelfield alludes to, there can be many barriers to the proper disposal of waste, which might have an impact on fly tipping - for example, people not having access to a car to drive to the tip.
Joe Allen, who lives in Salford and feels that fly tipping has “ruined” some of his local parks and other shared spaces, said: “I don’t blame anyone in particular, I think the majority of it is probably there because there’s some barrier to getting rid of it in a normal way.
“I live in an apartment in the city centre and we have 30 huge skips in each of the blocks, it’s very easy when people here want to throw away furniture, we have places to do it. I know that most of the area around me isn’t these big apartments, so I totally understand why they might not want to pay or organise with the council to get a big bed picked up when you can just dump it somewhere.”
John Read of national campaign group Clean Up Britain disagrees, calling fly tippers “lazy and antisocial”. However, regardless of why people are fly tipping, or whose fault it is, this illegal dumping of waste has a huge economic impact.
Last year, councils in the North spent £3.6 million just on clearing instances of large-scale fly-tipping alone - which only accounts for a fraction of the overall cost. And it’s taxpayers who are picking up the bill.
To help tackle the problem, Environment Minister Jo Churchill unveiled a crackdown on waste criminals earlier this year, as part of plans to reform the waste industry. She said: “Waste criminals show complete disregard for our communities, the environment and the taxpayer.
“We have disrupted these rogue operators by giving extra powers to the Environment Agency, with nearly 1,000 illegal waste sites now being shut down each year, while our new Joint Unit for Waste Crime is successfully disrupting criminal gangs, for example, prosecuting fly tippers illegally dumping hundreds of tonnes of hazardous waste across the countryside.”
The plans will also reform the licensing system to clamp down on abuse, while new mandatory digital waste tracking aims to improve transparency and make it easier for households to check their waste is being disposed of legally.
Mr Read has welcomed the measures, but says there has not been enough emphasis on the enforcement of the law. At the moment, it’s highly unusual that fly tippers actually get caught and punished - in most cases, they get away with the crime altogether.
In the North, councils took action of any kind - be it conducting an investigation, sending out warning letters, doling out fines or prosecuting someone - on around 135,000 occasions in 2020/21. That was down from more than 160,000 actions in 2019/20, despite the increase in incidents. It means that in more than half of cases, fly-tippers in the region got away with it completely - assuming that one action relates to a single incident.
Prosecutions were down from around 1,100 cases in 2019/20 to just over 350 last year - with around 290 of those found guilty fined in court. It means councils were only able to collect around £103,500 in court fines in 2020/21.
The number of fixed penalty notices handed out also fell dramatically, from around 18,400 to 9,400, and fewer than 2,100 were subsequently paid. The amount of money collected through FPNs is unavailable - but the overall amount received by councils in fines will only be a fraction of what it cost to clear up the waste that was dumped.
Mr Read said: “We need to see some high profile examples of people who’ve been seriously fined. If a council took somebody to a magistrates court they could in theory have a £50,000 imposed on them, or they could even be sent to jail for 12 months. But in reality, this virtually never ever happens.
“The legal system is not imposing serious enough penalties and sentences on people, despite the fact that their ability to do so exists. This is just totally inadequate, and one of the things we want to see at Clean Up Britain is a minimum fine for anyone caught fly tipping, and that is £5,000. We’d also like for one or two people to be sent to prison who are repetitive fly tippers.”
Ultimately, however, it’s up to all of us to do our part to tackle fly tipping. Helen Bingham of environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy said: “I think it’s everybody’s responsibility, I don’t think we can put the responsibility on any one group of people. It’s individuals’, communities’, local governments’ and businesses' responsibility, because none of those groups alone can solve the problem.
“Local authorities can clear litter and fly tipping until the cows come home, they could spend all day every day clearing litter and fly tipping from our streets, from parks, from derelict areas, from the countryside. If we don’t change our behaviour as individuals then they’ll just have to keep doing that for time immemorial.”
The North in Numbers returns to all major podcasting platforms for its third series this month, including Apple and Spotify.
The podcast is a Laudable production for Reach, and it is presented by Annie Gouk and produced by Dan McLaughlin. Get in touch via laudable@reachplc.com
