Few caught, but authority near top for fines

ROTHERHAM Council is in the top three Yorkshire & Humber authorities for fining fly-tippers — despite tracing less than two per cent of perpetrators.

As the Advertiser reported last week, there were more than 5,180 incidents across the borough during 2022 but only about 100 fixed penalty notices given out.

Cllr Dominic Beck, cabinet member for environment, said: “It’s a big priority for the council that we pursue perpetrators and that’s very clear.

“We work with a number of stakeholders in the community, we have invested heavily recently in CCTV, overt and covert.

“We also do more than we’ve ever done in terms of out-of-hours enforcement as well and there’s a lot of activity that goes on.

“You’ll have seen in the last year or two some really high-profile prosecutions at court.

“Because of all this, we do perform really well.

“In the last data set, for 2020/21, Rotherham took 2,694 actions relating to fly-tipping, which is fourth in Yorkshire & Humber and highest in South Yorkshire.

“When you look at fines, we’re third in Yorkshire & Humber.

“We’re performing really well. It’s no small feat that Rotherham is third.

“We’re only just behind Sheffield and you know how big Sheffield is.”

Cllr Lewis Mills, Conservatives, said: “With fixed penalty notices, I wouldn’t say it’s been a success.

“Out of 5,186, we’ve only charged 101. That’s 1.94 per cent.

“How effective is the CCTV operation? It cost around £2,000 per camera, we’ve 12 across the borough, so £24,000.

“We’ve collected £22,150 in fixed penalty notices so, to me, it doesn’t weigh up.”

Cllr Beck said: “It’s not an easy part of what we do in environmental health.

“Save for actually catching them in the act, we have to rely on reports from the public, things we find within the waste that link us to addresses or individuals, or evidence from CCTV coverage.

“The politics of it is that if we had more money to invest, we would be able to do more.”

An RMBC spokesperson pointed out that not all incidents were the intentional and illegal dumping of waste.

She added: “It could be reports of items that have been blown from building sites or gardens in periods of high winds, or items that have fallen off wagons during transit, or remaining debris after a road traffic collision.”