We had barely pressed the publish button on our latest fly-tipping report than the Sage of Waddon, Arfur Towcrate, was posting to Twitter another example of how the state of Croydon’s streets is utterly rubbish:
Towcrate’s picture shows it is not just in the “gritty north” of the borough that fly-tipping is commonplace (Waddon is a ward in Croydon South, not that Chris Philp has realised that yet).
Down amid the dreamy hills of Addington, another concerned resident, Tim Rodgers, has been angrily highlighting the latest illegal incursion by travellers and the mess that is created as a consequence.
The picture below was taken in Sunken Road, off Gravel Hill on Monday. Rodgers says that despite reporting the mess, which includes dangerous asbestos sheeting, seven days earlier, apart from taking away “evidence” for investigation, the council had done nothing to remove the piles of unsightly crap for a week. And don’t wait for any action ever to be taken against the culprits.
The Tories who run the council have decided to throw an extra £100,000 at the matter of fly-tipping, conveniently for them in the weeks before the local election. But it is all too little, too late.
The latest edition of our “Town Hall Pravda” (© “Big” Eric Pickles, the local government minister), or Your Croydon, boldly claims that, “Fly-tippers in Croydon are increasingly likely to be caught, fined and prosecuted for a crime that costs council taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.”
In the same article, the council claims that the number of enforcement notices has “more than tripled”. It is easy, though, to “triple”, quadruple, or even quintuple enforcement action if previously next to nothing was being done, leaving the streets of Croydon a place where fly-tippers could dump their rubbish without any risk of ever being caught.
Apparently, according to the Council Tax-funded propaganda sheet, “nearly 20” criminal prosecutions are now under way.
“Nearly 20”? Why the imprecision on such a small number of prosecutions? Is it because they want to disguise quite how few prosecutions are taking place, even now?
Yet instances of enforcement are remarkably few and far between, with action taken in just 1 in every 100 cases in 2012-2013. With so few prosecutions having been made in the past, bold statements by the council of “tripling” the number of prosecutions are exposed for the empty boasts that they really are.
And then there’s the seemingly useless My Croydon App.
The picture below shows another instance of fly-tipping on Tanfield Road in Waddon – a favourite spot for residents too lazy to visit the tip to dump unwanted furniture and other domestic detritus. The Tory council’s policy of charging residents for the removal of bulky waste items has been utterly counter-productive. Unsightly rather than asbestos-dangerous, nonetheless it was reported on Monday.
![IMG_0894[1]](https://i0.wp.com/insidecroydon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/img_08941-e1395389237848.jpg)
Except the My Croydon App did not work.
The GPS in the system could not locate London, never mind Tanfield Road (that detail in was typed in, but without a GPS location, it is impossible to complete the report on the Croydon Council App). So it was reported via Twitter to @YourCroydon. No acknowledgement was received.
By yesterday afternoon, the dumped rubbish was still there, now joined by other items of discarded household waste. And no chance of any prosecutions or action by the council.
It seems we’re need to start running a 2014 edition of the Garbage Gallery…
- Send your pictures, with a note of the time, date and location, to inside.croydon@btinternet.com, marking the subject field “Garbage Gallery 2014”.
- Croydon in 2013: The Garbage Gallery revisited
- Croydon in 2012: The Garbage Gallery
- Fly tipping more than doubled in Croydon since 2010
- Dirty Croydon: “I’m ashamed of the dirty state of my road”
- Croydon in a Pickles again over its rubbish service
Coming to Croydon
- David Lean Cinema: Basically Johnny Moped, Mar 27-28
- Crystal Palace Question Time, Mar 27
- Croydon Half-marathon, Mar 30
- David Lean Cinema: 12 Years a Slave, Apr 3
- David Lean Cinema: The Great Beauty, Apr 10
- Norwood Society Talk: Crystal Palace, Apr 17
- David Lean Cinema: Inside Llewyn Davis, Apr 17
- Opening of Marlpit Lane bowling and putting greens, Apr 17
- Arts and Crafts Market, Exchange Square, Apr 19
- David Lean Cinema: Short Term, Apr 24
- Norwood Society Talk: West Norwood – a place of change, May 15
- Croydon RFC charity memorial day, May 17
- Norwood Society Talk: The Concrete Church, June 19
- Crystal Palace Overground Festival, June 26-29
- Norwood Society Talk: War Memorials, Sep 18
- Norwood Society Talk: From Fire Station to Theatre, Oct 16
- Norwood Society Talk: Lambeth’s Archives, Nov 20
Inside Croydon: Croydon’s only independent news source, based in the heart of the borough: 516,649 page views (Jan-Dec 2013)
If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, a residents’ or business association or local event, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
I agree the App is not fit for purpose. I have a Smartphone that is less that 2 years old which work fine. However, I cannot even install the App because my Android system is too old and Croydon Council failed to properly develop the App to run on all Smartphones.
Another thing I have noticed is in Addiscombe are the number of ‘home goals’. I am constantly reporting Orange Council bags dumped on the pavement. Normally these bags are used by the road sweeper as they clean the streets. Then the refuse lorry is meant to come round and pick up those bags. Logically they should be cleared within a couple of hours but in Addiscombe it seems that unless I report them they just stay there for days. Obviously those Orange bags attract other bags (as well as having other hygiene issues).
Peter – I have a Samsung S3, and have the latest Android software on it. The App can’t cope with some locations in central Croydon, and reports I’ve made have been ignored. MyCroydon is a crap App.
The Tories promised us in December 2012 to make recycling compulsory. From what I see – overflowing bins containing recyclable materials – that was just greenwash. They’ve probably abandoned the idea so that they can guarantee the incinerator a steady supply of fuel.
I remember during the winter of discontent when the rubbish piled up in the streets and…
now the rubbish can be seen on stage – whenever you’re on.
It’s not surprising people are tempted to fly tip. I just found Purley Oaks dump still shut because of the floods and a 400 yard stationary queue at Factory Lane. Fishers Farm shuts at 1PM on Sunday. I gave up on it in favour of lunch and will have another go tomorrow as I happen to have the day off. Sunday afternoon is the most popular time for people to get rid of stuff at the end of a weekend’s DIY or gardening yet the one working dump shuts at 4PM and people working on Monday have got little (legal) choice but to spend their afternoon in a traffic jam in Factory Lane.
The council should be making it as easy as possible for us to recycle stuff. The least they could do is run the dumps until dusk.
No, no, no Nick Davies. We can’t have Croydon council services run for the convenience of Croydon residents, that would never do. It would give people all sorts of ideas – we can’t have that. Next thing you know, the mob will be insisting that they are properly consulted and listened to – and their views acted upon! That would undermine democracy, where once every 4 years, we stick a few Xs in a few boxes on a piece of paper, and hand over responsibility for local affairs to a cabinet elected by a cabal. Better to have our streets strewn with waste than to overturn the natural order of things.