Local planning department overseas increase in fly tipping

Local farmer, of Berkyn Manor Farm in Horton, Colin Rayner director of Rayner & Sons Ltd has been forced to remove concrete blocks and tyres from their own land by Buckinghamshire County Council planning department.

Colin was threatened with a criminal record if he didn’t comply with their edict by January 31st.

Colin has agreed to comply, as he doesn’t want to get a criminal record when all he was attempting to achieve was to reduce the incredible amount of fly tipping and destruction of valuable crops growing in their fields.

Fly-tipping is illegal dumping of liquid or solid waste on land or in water. The waste is usually dumped to avoid disposal costs.

We don’t know if this decision only applies to farm land in Buckinghamshire, or if the decision will also apply to land in Berkshire, the little knowledge I have of RBWM planning department does not fill me with great confidence.

Colin now fears this ruling will lead to a huge increase in fly-tipping in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire where J Rayner and Sons Ltd have farms.

Buckinghamshire County Council said the tyres and concrete blocks were unsightly, despite J Rayner Ltd offering to paint them green or plant them with flowers, presumably because they prefer to look upon piles of building rubbish and abandoned cars in field entrances instead…??

The need to place obstacles in field entrances is a huge inconvenience to local farmers as it is time consuming and problematic to move and replace them every time they access the field, but is necessary as without them they quickly become targeted by fly tippers, who unfortunately are rarely caught, Government statistics show about 90% of incidents don’t result in any fines. (See below)

Councils do have teams to deal with rubbish dumped on publicly accessible land, but say if it is private land it is the land owners problem, and this ruling has just made that much worse.

Some fly-tipping stats:

• For the 2020/21 year, local authorities in England dealt with 1.13 million fly-tipping incidents, an increase of 16%from the 980,000 reported in 2019/20.
• As in the previous year, just under two thirds (65%) of fly-tips involved household waste. Total incidents involving household waste were 737,000 in 2020/21, an increase of 16% from 635,000 incidents in 2019/20.
• The most common place for fly-tipping to occur was on highways (pavements and roads), which accounted for over two fifths (43%) of total incidents in 2020/21, the same as in 2019/20. In 2020/21, the number of highway incidents was 485,000, which was an increase of 16% from 419,000 in 2019/20.
• The most common size category for fly-tipping incidents in 2020/21 was equivalent to a ‘small van load’ (34% of total incidents), followed by the equivalent of a ‘car boot or less’ (26%).
• In 2020/21, 39,000 or 4% of total incidents were of ‘tipper lorry load’ size or larger, which is an increase of 16% from 33,000 in 2019/20. For these large fly-tipping incidents, the cost of clearance to local authorities in England in 2020/21 was £11.6 million, compared with £10.9 million in 2019/20.
• Local authorities carried out 456,000 enforcement actions in 2020/21, a decrease of 18,000 actions (4%) from 474,000 in 2019/20.
• The number of fixed penalty noticesissued was 57,600 in 2020/21, a decrease of 24% from 75,400 in 2019/20. This is the second most common action after investigations and accounted for 13% of all actions in 2020/21.
• The number of court fines issued decreased by 51% from 2,672 to 1,313in 2020/21, with the value of total fines decreasing to £440,000 (a decrease of 62% on the £1,170,000 total value of fines in 2019/20).

Source gov.uk

If you wish to report fly tipping it can be done here

The responsibilities of Councils with regards to fly tipping can be seen here

BBC – fly-tipping: England sees more than 1 million incidents in a year.