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Rubbish piles up on our streets as council keeps spinning

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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?

As Inside Croydon has reported before, and according to official government figures – rather than our council’s own, unaudited claims – fly-tipping has more than doubled in the borough in past four years under the current administration.

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.

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…

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