CROYDON IN CRISIS: Just weeks after the borough was named ‘the filthiest in London’ because of its poor bin collection rate, further data shows the cash-strapped council forking out £1m to clear nearly 40,000 reported incidents of fly-tipping in the past year. By PAUL LUSHION, environment correspondent
Central to the problem: even town centre sites have become fly-tip hotspots in Croydon
Croydon under Mayor Jason Perry has now claimed the title of having the most fly-tips in the whole of the country, just weeks after its streets were labelled “the filthiest in London” because of the high number of missed bin collections.
Both sets of data were generated by independent third parties, and indicate the poor level of enforcement action conducted by the local authority. They also trace back to the role of Croydon’s rubbish contractors, Veolia, who have just landed a £40million, seven-year contract.
According to a response to a Freedom of Information request, the latest figures for the total number of fly-tips that are reported or recorded show that Croydon had 38,163 incidents in 2023-2024. And that does not include illegal fly-tips on private property, for which the council is not responsible.
Croydon’s figures are 17% higher than the next worst borough for fly-tips, Camden (31,457), and 10 times higher than the nation average.
Neighbouring borough Merton, like Croydon a member of the South London Waste Partnership, also features in the top 10 areas for fly-tipping, with 19,846. Both Croydon and Merton hire Veolia to run their street-cleaning, bin collection and fly-tip response efforts.
Neither Croydon, Merton nor even Veolia can be entirely responsible for the activities of criminal fly-tippers, who often turn out to be shady commercial concerns which operate without a proper licence and conduct waste clearance works on the cheap.
But the upturn in Croydon’s fly-tipping volume follows the disbandment of most of its dedicated enforcement team and a fall in the number of prosecutions brought against criminal fly-tippers. The council issued just 10 fixed penalty notices between 2022 and 2023.
The fly-tipping data has been assembled by outdoor-clothing brand TOG24, who used FoI requests to get figures from every council in the country, and to discover how much it is costing the nation.
The worst-hit councils in terms of number of fly-tipping incidents for 2023-2024 are:
- Croydon Council: 38,163
- Camden Council: 31,457
- Hounslow Council: 31,361
- Nottingham City Council: 22,284
- Haringey Council: 22,148
- Merton Council: 19,846
Cleaning up this illegally dumped rubbish cost Croydon Council Tax-payers £1,099,594. The council stung with the biggest clean-up bill was Dundee City Council, with £3.3million. Camden and Enfield councils also spent more than Croydon on fly-tip clearances.
Rubbish performance: this is what a fly-tip in Shirley looked like after Veolia had been to clear it up last month
Merton spent £888,197 to clear its fly-tips.
“We wanted to continue to understand how big an impact fly-tipping is having and on people’s enjoyment of our beautiful country,” said Mark Ward, TOG24’s managing director.
“We are really keen for everyone else to love it as much as we do, but it’s hard when there’s rubbish strewn everywhere. As well as the impact on wildlife, there’s also the financial aspect in terms of the costs to local authorities. These are significant costs at a time when councils face a lot of other challenges. This money could be better spent elsewhere.”
Croydon Council’s party line is to blame the borough’s size and large population. According to the council propaganda department, dealing with fly-tips is “a key priority” for the borough’s Mayor, piss-poor Jason Perry.
The council claims that 98% of reported fly-tips are cleared within 24 hours.
You’ve bin done: meet the new rubbish contractors, same as the old rubbish contractors
None of which addresses the low number of prosecutions brought against the criminal fly-tippers.
Nor the long-standing concerns with the poor performance of rubbish contractor Veolia.
It is because of Veolia that there are around 1,000 fewer street bins around the pavements of Croydon today than there were in 2019: fewer bins means fewer collections means fewer staff for Veolia to pay to do the work.
And fewer bins also means filthier streets, too, whether through missed bin collections or fly-tips.
Read more: Two-year search to replace Veolia hands £40m deal to… Veolia
Read more: BINMAGEDDON: Mayor’s secret plan to charge £5 per new bin
Read more: Croydon and three other boroughs to bin Veolia rubbish deal
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Maybe there are more people reporting the fly tipping in Croydon than in other boroughs? Incidents might not be more than average. It’s the offenders that should be targeted. When I’ve reported fly tips via the Love Clean Streets app they are dealt with within a couple of days.
Veolia’s target is to clear fly-tips within 24 hours, Mary. Sounds like they are not meeting that in your cases.
The number of fly tips I have reported on the app are in the 100s. most are dealt with in under 12 hours. Very few in over 24hours – 5 so far this year.
8 years ago, Councillor Scott Roche tweeted “Every Resident we spoke to got very angry over the masses of flytipping in #Norbury no action”.
Now he’s in charge of the problem, what’s he doing about it? Nothing. Apart from mouthing some platitudes with Mayor Perry at last month’s launch of the “Cleaner Croydon Campaign”.
As iC reported in the summer, Croydon has the second worst record in England and the worst in London for failing to prosecute flytippers
https://insidecroydon.com/2024/06/14/croydons-fly-tip-prosecution-record-is-2nd-worst-in-all-england/
Credit where it’s due, Veolia are very quick to pick up flytips that are reported to them on the Love Clean Streets app. This begs the question how much us taxpayers are forking out to stop this filthy borough from being completely swamped by rubbish. Where there’s muck there’s brass, as they say oop North
regular fly tip spot at the end of my road..( junction of Tanfield Rd and Bramley Hill ). Neighbourhood watch have asked for cctv to catch the offenders .. so far … no sign of it .. would be cheaper than keep sending out collection team… the more you collect .. the more they will dump it there unless they are stopped .
London Road in West Croydon is a nightmare. Many people simply walk out of their homes and dump their domestic garbage on the street. We need proper anti-littering enforcement so that some sense of civic pride can be generated in the residents.
That isn’t “fly-tipping”. That’s putting the rubbish out under the arrangements with £40m rubbish contractors Veolia.
Under Veolia’s new, seven-year deal, Mayor Jason Perry has agreed that residents living in flats over shops, like along London Road, can stick their black bin bags out on the pavement twice a week, instead of once a fortnight. And piss-poor Perry seems to think this is a good idea.
Walk through Croydon and there are overflowing residential bins and waste strewn everywhere, no public bins, and no one seems to take pride in the place so no wonder things like this happen. More investment would help but we all know that won’t happen.
You’re right Eve. But, surely, we should take more pride and care in our environment? We can’t expect ‘the state’ to do everything for us.
It was the “state”, ie. the council, that created the #Binmageddon that plagues our streets, imposed at the behest of their rubbish contractors to make their work swifter and cheaper. Is it really too much to expect the contractor-driven council to come up with a solution to the blight of bins? Or to come up with some enforcement that ensures that their contractors, or householders, return the wheelies to off-street storage, and not left in the middle of public pavements, often for days on end?
The current system, with its quick response to clearing fly-tipping but no follow-up enforcement, is undoubtedly making the problem worse. Many people have caught on, confidently dumping household junk on the street knowing someone like me will report it. It’s become an effective free collection service for them. As a result, the problem is compounding—both in rubbish volume and financial strain. We need to get tougher on tracing offenders, naming, shaming, and issuing heavy fines. The council’s ‘can’t do’ attitude, hiding behind weak excuses like GDPR, is utterly pathetic.
It baffles me that towns don’t have a cardboard collection service (paid for or free or maybe partly funded by Amazon etc) to dispense with the absolute mountain of cardboard boxes we now all get from online shopping .
If you dont have a suitable car to take it to the recycling centre how on earth do you get rid of it . And don’t say via the fortnightly recycling service – ours has not visited our street in nearly 2-3 months
But Jonathan. Haven’t you reported your missed recycling collections using the council’s crap app?
Tell us the name of your street.