It was the fourth year in a row that incidents increased.<\/p>\n
Around 56,000 fixed penalty notices were handed out by councils to people caught illegally dumping.<\/p>\n
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said household waste accounted for two-thirds of fly-tipping.<\/p>\n
Between April 2016 and March 2017, there were 1,002,000 cases of fly-tipping handled by councils in England, equivalent to 114 every hour –\u00a066,000 (7%) more than the year before.<\/p>\n
There was a slight decrease in the number of enforcement actions taken by councils, such as investigations and warning letters.<\/p>\n
In England in 2016-17, there were 474,000 enforcement actions carried out, a drop of 20,000 on the year before, although 56,000 fixed penalty notices were given for small scale dumping.<\/p>\n
In May of last year, all councils across the country were granted additional powers that allowed them to give fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping as well as their existing powers to use them for littering and anti-social behaviour.<\/p>\n
Birmingham-based meat firm Premium Halal Meat & Poultry was prosecuted at the city’s magistrates court in July 2016 and given the biggest financial penalty of the year – \u00a325,541.<\/p>\n
The company had to pay a fine and costs after being prosecuted by Birmingham City Council.<\/p>\n
The most common place for waste to be dumped was at the side of the road.<\/p>\n
Defra said two-thirds (67%) of fly-tips “involved household waste”.<\/p>\n
“Total incidents involving household waste increased by 8% from 2015\/16.”<\/p>\n
In a report accompanying the statistics Defra said, “Many local authorities have started to improve the way they capture and report fly-tips over the past few years, so the increase over time should be interpreted with some care.”<\/p>\n
A Defra spokesman said: “Fly-tipping is an unacceptable blight on our landscape, which is why we have cracked down on offenders by strengthening sentencing guidelines and giving councils the powers to hand out on-the-spot fines to fly-tippers.<\/p>\n
“We have made it easier for vehicles suspected of being used for fly-tipping to be stopped, searched and seized and will continue to work with local partners to stop this inexcusable crime.”<\/p>\n
The Local Government Association, which represents councils, said cleaning up fly-tipping was diverting money away from other services.<\/p>\n
Its environment spokesman Martin Tett said, “The Government has responded to our call for councils to be able to apply Fixed Penalty Notices for small scale fly-tipping – and this is a big step in the right direction.<\/p>\n
“When they take offenders to court, councils need a faster and more effective legal system which means fly-tippers are given hard-hitting fines for more serious offences. Manufacturers also need to provide more take-back services so people can hand in old furniture and mattresses when they buy new ones.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At a cost of \u00a358m, more than one million incidents of fly-tipping were dealt with by councils in England in 2016-17. It was the fourth year in a row that incidents increased. Around 56,000 fixed penalty notices were handed out by councils to people caught illegally dumping. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":24562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,38,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-national-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}