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You are here: Southwark \ News \ COUNCIL FORCED TO SPEND £1 MILLION IN CLEAN-UPS AS FLYTIPPING INCREASES
News
COUNCIL FORCED TO SPEND £1 MILLION IN CLEAN-UPS AS FLYTIPPING INCREASES
17 November 2008
By David Yuill
davidy@southwarknews.org
SOUTHWARK WAS forced to spend almost £1 million this year to cope with the flytipping epidemic, making it the thirteenth most prolific borough in the country for the crime.
Latest figures, released last month by DEFRA, (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), show that the council was called out to 21,324 incidents of flytipping to collect and dispose of waste - an all-time high for the borough.
Although other London boroughs including Wandsworth (£5.8m), Newham (£2.2m) and Lewisham (£1.6m), as well as top-spenders Liverpool City Council (£11.8m), forked out considerably more than Southwark, the £863,979 spent in the financial year from 2007-08 is stretching the council's budget.
Executive member for community safety, Cllr Paul Kyriacou, told the 'News': "Southwark is widely regarded as one of the most vigilant and effective local authorities in the country when it comes to dealing with flytipping.
"Yes, we record a high rate of flytipping - because what we class as flytipping ranges from a discarded black bin bag, to large-scale truck loads of waste. Not all local authorites record flytipping this thoroughly, and as a result, we record high flytipping rates compared to many other authorities."
Cllr Kyriacou went on to insist that the council recuperated a large chunk of the money that was spent by fining those caught in the act.
"While it does cost to clean up flytipping," he explained, "we make sure that people who flytip are fined - so they're effectively paying for the cleanup themselves.
“We have the second highest rate of fixed penalty notices for flytipping in the country, and the payment rate is an all-time high of 90 per cent.
"DEFRA publishes scores for local authorities which measure how effectively they are dealing with litter, grafitti, flyposting and flytipping. Southwark's been awarded the top possible score since 2004. This shows that we've experienced a year on year reduction in flytipping, and an increase in prosecutions."
The figures have been used by Mark Attwood, the founder of this week’s national 'Share-a-skip week', to highlight the financial and environmental impact of flytipping.
He said: "The objective of 'Share-A-Skip' week is to prevent fly-tipping, reduce waste to landfill and save people money."
"Because of the credit crunch, people are looking to dispose of their waste in irresponsible and sometimes illegal ways because they perceive it as being cheaper than hiring a licensed skip, but the increase in fly-tipping actually ends up costing our society more because it's the councils that have to clear the waste up, not to mention the environmental damage it creates."
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Comments (1)
1. At 02:22 PM on 17 Nov 2008, Will wrote:
Litteraction.org.uk
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