Not the tuneful feathered warbler that visits us in the summer to rear its young (that's a fly catcher) before returning south for the winter, no these are rouges who are with us year round and country wide. In my very first blog 'Lets get started' I mentioned that the abandoned allotments had been victim to fly tipping on an industrial scale, but now back in use and secured they are safe from this scourge. Alas the lane that leads to them is not and so every 6-8 weeks a truck load gets dumped along its length. Thankfully only twice in the three years the allotment have been back up and running has the lane been blocked to all traffic. Lately though the tippers have left their rubbish at the rear emergency access to St Martins Primary School and I am sure the rotten devils do it because they know the Council will have to clear it up within 24 hours.
They are hard to catch but mid-summer a plucky lady plot holder leaving the site late came across a truck with the back up and about to tip. The startled operator quickly dropped the back down again, threw back on the bits lying about and went to leave. Meanwhile our hero locked herself in the car and called the police while the rouge was shouting obscenities at her through the window. Shaken she learned that the police caught up with the driver and had a 'chat with him'. Incredible as it may seem there are stiff penalties for fly tipping, fines of up to £5000, seizure of vehicles and paying the costs to the council, but for the most part its treated as a misdemeanour by the police and left to individual authorities to pursue a prosecution.
Two things strike me as wrong here, one, the actions of the rouge to the lady constitute 'threatening behaviour' under the criminal justice act, and secondly carrying waste without a licence from the department of environment gets an on the spot fine of £300. Maybe the police were not aware of the former and of the latter, well maybe he did have a waste licence. Which got me thinking. A quick check of the small adds in the local paper revealed six offering a waste clearance service, all licenced, but who is to say that any rubbish you pay them to clear goes to a waste disposal site. It is an attractive option for the rouge to pocket the money he has charged for disposal, since it is tax free, as 150kg of waste will cost approximately £60 if taken to an official site. What would it be for a truck load! Its worth remembering that any dumped rubbish that can be traced back to a householder makes them liable to the fines and penalties.
Before you start thinking that I'm getting hot under the collar about nothing let me just tell you the scale of this problem. Official Government figures for England and Wales for the year 2011-12 give 744,000 incidents of fly tipping which cost local authorities £37.4m to clear up, in that same period there were just 2,800 successful prosecutions against the fly tippers. Now what does that tell you!. As for our local MVDC (Mole Valley District Council) there were 915 incidents which cost the local rate payer £41,654 to clear up. That's me, and I am incensed.
These figures are for public places and do not take into account waste, sometimes hazardous waste at that, being dumped on private land such as the National Trust and farms which costs for the NT a lump out of their charitable subscriptions (me again) and for farmers a cut in profits. No one seems to be able to get a handle on this and the best I've heard is that as its so difficult to stop maybe we should just let them take it free of charge to the waste sites. What they do not realise that not only would we pay per tonne the going rate for disposal but also a Government Tax of £80 a tonne on top. We have the laws to stop or at least curb it. LETS USE THEM.
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