Council launches new campaign to clamp down on fly-tipping, highlighting the cost to taxpayers and toll it takes on residents. Extraordinary items dumped include a sheep’s head.
Flytips collected by the council
In the past 12 months, Barnet Council has removed thousands of fly-tips, with enough rubbish to fill seven Olympic-size swimming pools. The annual cost of cleaning up is in excess of £500,000.
As part of the council’s recently launched ‘Caring for Our Places’ campaign, we are calling on residents to work with us to end fly tipping in Barnet. That’s the message that can be seen on a range of outdoor advertising sites, especially in some of the borough’s fly tipping hotspots.
To make it easier for residents to report incidents of illegal waste dumping, there’s now a simple weblink to access our reporting portal at www.barnet.gov.uk/reportit, also accessible via a QR code at all our advertising locations.
Councillor Alan Schneiderman, Cabinet Member for Environment and Climate Change, said: “Fly-tips are a source of misery. Not only are they a public health issue, they are also eyesores and it can be frankly depressing for people to have to walk past them on their streets. Every year the council spends more than £500,000 cleaning them up – money which could be better spent on other services for residents.
“Having started a new approach in late July, we are already seeing the impact on the number of fly tips leading to identification of offenders and we are starting to take action against them. Caring for Our Places is not just the name of a campaign, but is what we do here in Barnet. We will not stand for our streets and public places being blighted by unsightly fly tips and will take action wherever we can to drive those who seek to destroy Barnet’s beauty out of the borough. Work with us to end fly tipping in Barnet.”
The council has recently introduced a new joined-up way of working that sees reports registered and passed to a team of community safety officers to investigate, using the full range of tools at our disposal including our significantly expanded CCTV network, and identify anything that will help the council to work out who was responsible for the fly tip, before a Street Scene crew returns later to get the site cleared. Offenders face fines of £200, rising to £400 for a second offence and potential prosecution for anyone who offends multiple times.
The council hopes that this new approach will lead to a much higher level of fixed penalty notices being issued to offenders, driving down the number of incidents and helping to improve the environment for all our residents.
Notes to editors:
- Last year (2023/24) in Barnet, the council collected approximately 16,600 cubic metres of fly tipped waste – the equivalent of six and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools (picture available of just one day’s waste on request)
- Some of the more unusual items to have been discovered by our fly tip crews over the past year include a sheep’s head
- Journalists, broadcasters and photographers are invited to go out with our fly tipping crew to see the process – get in touch with johnathan.schroder@barnet.gov.uk to arrange a visit.