Fly-tipping rises in Shropshire and Telford as bin collections cut
Fly-tipping increased by a fifth last year, prompting claims that the move to less frequent bin collections is causing people to dump their rubbish illegally.
Local authorities in England dealt with 852,000 incidents of fly-tipping in 2013/14, up from 711,000 in the previous year.
Incidents ranged from a single black bag being dumped to a tipper lorry-load.
Nearly two thirds of the incidents involved household waste.
Councils spent £45 million clearing up the dumped waste, 24 per cent more than in 2012/13.
In both Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin, bins are collected on a fortnightly basis.
It is understood fly-tipping costs Telford & Wrekin Council in the region of £250,000 a year to clean up, with nearly 4,000 reported incidents from April 2013 to March 2014 – an average of 11-a-day.
Shropshire Council had to deal with nearly 1,700 incidents over the same 12-month period – a rate of nearly five a day.
Doretta Cocks, who founded the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collections, said that people were resorting to fly-tipping because their bins were overflowing as they were being collected fortnightly or, in some areas, once every three weeks.
"We warned years ago that ending weekly waste collections would increase fly-tipping and the trend will continue as even more councils move to three-weekly or even monthly collections," she said.
"It makes people act irresponsibly because there is no responsible way of getting rid of your rubbish, especially if you do not have a car.
"You can't be expected to take your rubbish to the council tip on a bus.
"Some tips have closed anyway and councils are talking about charging for those that remain.
"That is likely to make fly-tipping even worse.
"I have known a council refuse to collect a recycling bin because there was a yoghurt pot inside which was not recycleable."
She said that some councils had also prompted more fly-tipping by reducing the size of bins and introducing more complex rules on what they collected from homes.
Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, launched a £250 million fund to encourage councils to restore weekly collections but none have done so, claiming it would be too expensive despite the extra funding on offer.
The increase in fly-tipping was the first rise for at least seven years. It fell steadily from 1,284 million incidents in 2007/08 to 711,000 in 2012/13.
The Local Government Association called for new powers to issue fixed penalties for fly-tipping. A spokesman said: "The rise which these figures reveal underlines the urgent need for councils to be given tougher powers."
