Ongoing battle to beat the fly-tippers

9:33am Tuesday 1st April 2008

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Spring is in the air at last. The unseasonal Easter snow has melted - and the trees are poised to explode into colour.

Families venturing into the great outdoors during school holidays this week, however, may find it is not only blossoms and birdsong that greet them.

Heaps of broken furniture, rusty old bikes, piles of bricks and even toxic asbestos are depressingly familiar sights in woods, on riverbanks and at other beautyspots the length and breadth of Essex.

Colchester Council paid out £18,000 to clear up after 527 cases of fly-tipping during the 2006/7 financial year, with not a single offender caught or prosecuted.

In Tendring the bill was an even higher £27,000, with 564 incidents dealt with and only one culprit brought to justice.

Worse still, the figures do not even take account of the tonnes of rubbish dumped in cases where councils are not responsible.

Landowners are currently required to personally fund the removal of whatever the tippers decide to ditch on their property, a state of affairs that North Essex MP Bernard Jenkin is eager to change.

He has brought his own private member's bill before Parliament, calling for clean-up costs - which often run into thousands of pounds - to be borne by local authorities.

The Conservative has the backing of senior party colleagues and former Labour environment minister Michael Meacher, though not the Government.

He said it was unfair to force the victims of a crime to pay - especially given the high likelihood that the criminals themselves would get off scot-free.

"At present, landowners feel helpless, so it is not surprising that 50 per cent of those who are suffering from fly-tipping do not bother to report it," he said.

"Why should they, if it does not lead to a proper investigation of the incident or any prospect of a prosecution?

"In a 2006 survey, farmers said that in only 22 per cent of cases had the police investigated their complaints, even though fly-tipping is a criminal offence." Mr Jenkin added: "At the moment, nobody will even bother to try and find out who has tipped the rubbish. It is left to the landowner to clear it up.

"My bill puts the obligation on the local authority, which takes the burden off the innocent landowner and is also an incentive for the authority to find out who is responsible."

Mr Jenkin believes councils are not trying hard enough to catch offenders. But that view is firmly contradicted by waste chiefs.

They say they are doing their utmost to bring the tippers to book, but face a constant uphill struggle to gather enough evidence to win cases in court.

Chris Kitcher, acting head of environmental services at Tendring Council, has recently dealt with three major dumping incidents in three months in the Little Bromley area.

"In each case, we carry out a full investigation," he said. "The first thing we do is search through whatever has been dumped, to see if there are any clues as to where it has come from.

"We interview people in the locality who may have witnessed the material being unloaded, and we check with building control to find out who is doing work in the area that might create that kind of waste."

Dave McManus, street care and recycling manager at Colchester Council, said: "Fly-tipping is something we are very pro-active about. We are planning a concentrated campaign on it in the summer that will hopefully deal with some of the hotspots across the borough."

As far as the councils are concerned, they are doing their best, but catching a fly-tipper is not easy.

Anyone selfish enough to want to dump a load of rubbish in the countryside, rather than take it to the tip, will find a suitably isolated spot within 20 minutes drive of Colchester, Clacton or Harwich.

If they are lucky, they will manage to unload it without being spotted - and even if a car does drive by, how likely is it that the driver will get a good look at them, or even realise what they are up to?

In the end, there is only one answer to the problem of fly-tipping.

The offenders must take responsibility for their own actions and stop it - now!

After all - whether through clearance fees, increased council tax bills or ruined country views - each of us pays a price in the end for fly-tipping.