The issue of how to tackle flytipping within the Borough seems to have raised its head again recently, with some calling for increased enforcement patrols and more money to be thrown at tackling the problem.
Unlike many who are constantly calling for more fines, I have lived in and amongst poverty for almost 40 years. I have been one of the children surviving on a subsistence diet and have experienced homelessness and domestic violence shelters. I have also been involved with volunteering in those communities, on and off, since I was 16, so I have built up an understanding of some of the effects and causes of these issues – however I am no expert, and these are my own views, created from these experiences.
Over the past few years, I have reported thousands of instances of flytipping, mainly within the Trinity Ward, where I have been responsible for almost 25% of ALL flytipping reports in Burnley, and over the past 3 years (or even the 26 or so years I have lived here), I have seen very little change until fairly recently, where the amount of general waste (usually in black bags or carrier bags) that I am seeing has decreased, but the level of bulky waste hasn’t – bulky waste is made up of items like fridges, sofas, mattresses and other large household items.
Whereas general waste can often be tracked down to an individual, so that targeted help, education or enforcement can take place, bulky items are usually impossible to trace back to the perpetrator, so we see a constant cycle of bulky items being thrown out, the council clearing them away, then more items being dumped in their place – it is an unsustainable situation that can be a very deep money pit.
Deprivation is a big driver of the bulky waste flytipping problem within Burnley, but that is just one of the many drivers behind the problem.
People buy cheap furniture and white goods off Facebook because that’s all they can afford at the time – if you’ve only got £20 for a fridge freezer, you aren’t going to be buying anything decent – so it doesn’t last long, so they buy more cheap items from Facebook that cost £20 because that’s all they can afford, but then they can’t afford the fees for the collection of the old ones, so they get dumped – and the cycle continues.
Certainly in Trinity we also have a fairly big transient population due, in part, to the number of HMOs – people move in, work for a period and often move on within 6-12 months and either they, or the landlords, just dump everything on the back streets.They are also often hard to reach due to trust issues, no ties to the area, don’t speak or read English very well, have a low literacy level, or just don’t understand the rules, as in many places it is the norm to leave items and waste out to be collected.
You can only tackle those groups of residents with help and education, lifting people out of poverty and to an income level where they can afford decent appliances and furniture, helping to restore pride in where they live and themselves.
We can start that process by ending the 2 child benefit cap for Universal Credit, the bedroom tax and introducing a Universal Basic Income.
Enforcement is not the way forward with these residents.
Then there are the people that just don’t care, and never will.
Whatever you do or say, they will just throw everything onto the back street, or empty someone’s back yard for £30 and then take it round the corner and fill the yard of an empty house, dump it on a back street or a country layby – these are the ones that need the enforcement actions, because help and education just won’t change their attitudes – but that doesn’t mean you don’t try first.
It is all about ending the never ending cycle, not just constantly removing the rubbish so people just think it’s fine to keep throwing more out – that isn’t sustainable, and fines shouldn’t be the first thing to try.
The drivers behind flytipping are numerous and complex, and there is no single answer or fix to the problem. No administration in the Borough has managed to successfully tackle the problem, and no amount of political posturing will solve it either – the things you didn’t try when you were in power because you knew they wouldn’t work aren’t suddenly going to work now, and to say otherwise is an insult to the people of Burnley and Padiham.