Purley Way pile-on: this massive fly-tip beside a nature reserve and public footpath was allowed to accumulate for almost two years – with no action from the council or Environment Agency. It was dealt with by the property’s tenant
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Fly-tipping continues to get worse under the borough’s part-time Mayor, according to official government figures, reports our environment correspondent, PAUL LUSHION
Rubbish Mayor: Jason Perry has hiked Council Tax by 21%, and wants to charge £5 for new bins. But he’s doing nothing to deal with fly-tipping
Three months ago, the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (we’ll refer to them as DEFRA from now on) published, to little public notice or acclaim, a report on Fly-tipping statistics for England, 2022 to 2023.
Indeed, the report drew such little public notice, even Inside Croydon missed it. Until now.
Everyone (apart from the culprits) agrees that fly-tipping is bad and something should be done about it. The trouble is, very little action is being taken to tackle this environmental scourge, as can be seen on Croydon’s street corners and down its leafy country lanes.
For the 2022-2023 year, local authorities in England dealt with 1.08million fly-tipping incidents, a decrease of just 1% from the 1.09million reported in 2021-2022.
Around 42,000 fly-tips were of “tipper lorry load” size or larger, an increase from 37,000 in 2021-2022. This is fly-tipping on an industrial scale, literally, with some fly-tippers making money out of the practice, to the distress, and cost, of others.
The cost to local authorities in England of clearing these truckloads alone was £13.2million, up from £10.7 million in 2021-2022. Almost two-thirds of the fly-tipped material, according to the DEFRA report, is classed as household waste, which in theory could be recycled (or even incinerated).
Which shows that as well as being a rubbish government, the Tories’ waste processing model isn’t working.
Embarrassed by these figures, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government recently announced something that will have dumpers quaking in their boots. Not.
It’s official: the DEFRA report shows that Croydon is the second worst in England for taking enforcement action against fly-tippers, and the worst in London
At present, councils can fine fly-tippers up to £1,000, while courts can impose unlimited fines and up to five years in prison for large-scale fly-tipping. The Tories’ big idea is to add up to six penalty points to a fly-tipper’s driving licence. Not that commercial fly-tippers have ever been that bothered of the threat of being fined or jailed.
You can imagine the conversation in the snug bar at the Dumpers’ Arms: “Points on me licence you say? I’m shittin’ meself as we speak.”
Drill down through the piles of rubbish and into the hard core detail of local council performances and, to no one’s surprise, you find that Croydon Council’s record in dealing with fly-tipping is piss-poor.
In fact, under Tory Mayor Jason Perry, it’s the worst in London.
That’s when you look at the number of Fixed Penalty Notices issued (just 10 in 2022-2023) compared to total number of incidents (22,852).
That gives Croydon a percentage for penalties versus crimes of
0.0437598459653422%
In Enfield, they managed 92%.
Croydon ranks joint bottom of the London Fixed Penalty Notices league, alongside Barnet, with just 10. Not even one a month. Enfield issued 5,096 FPNs.
So it’s not just about finding the culprits. It’s about trying to find the culprits, something that part-time Perry’s council has abandoned doing.
In the past, there’s been some bleating about Croydon somehow being “targeted” by fly-tippers. That’s more likely to be true now, as the profiteering commercial fly-tippers will have realised that with Mayor Perry in charge at the Town Hall, there’s precious little chance of them ever being caught, never mind prosecuted.
The worst hotspot for tipping incidents is Brent, where they had more than 34,000 cases of fly-tipping. In Croydon, it was fewer than 23,000.
Croydon has actually managed to go backwards. The number of incidents in 2022-23 is down 14% from the previous year. However, total actions collapsed, down by 53% from the 2,078 in 2020 to a measly 986 in part-time Perry’s first year as Mayor.
Virtue-signalling: councillors saying they have reported a fly-tip overlooks the Tory council’s failure to prosecute criminals
Likewise with Fixed Penalty Notice actions, where there’s been a plummet of 96%. Croydon Council just doesn’t care about fly-tipping.
Across our once green and pleasant land, our borough ranks as the second worst in England, something that DEFRA pointed out in their press release (back in 2019, Croydon was fourth worst…). Getting rid of the council’s dedicated anti-tipping team has come with a cost.
Some clear-ups of massive fly-tips have been undertaken, though this is rarely, if ever, anything to do with our council. More often than not by independent businesses, as in the case of the steaming pile of mess that had been gathering on a vacant car park on the Purley Way for two years, while the toothless watchdog, the Environment Agency, and Croydon Council stood by (it was private land, so the council’s default was to sit on its hands and do nothing).
And within days of that clean-up taking place, some chancer in a tip-up truck was dumping another lorry-load nearby, no doubt for a hefty, cash-in-hand fee, and with no fear of anyone ever taking any prosecution action against them.
So next time you see a third-rate politician tweeting about clearing up fly-tipping, don’t encourage them or retweet them. Instead, ask why Croydon Council’s record is so bad and what they’re going to do about it.
And the next time piss-poor Perry claims he’s “clearing up a mess”, you will know that he is lying.
Read more: Council finally starts work to clear its own Waddon fly-tip
Read more: Residents’ despair over vile fly-tips, including a pig’s head
Read more: Collins deserves new T-shirt as fly-tip figures start to fall
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