Telford & Wrekin Council to adopt new fly-tipping strategy

Telford & Wrekin Council’s crackdown on fly-tipping is to due get even tougher.

It follows a year of highly successful environmental enforcement activity in which Neighbourhood Enforcement Officers responded to 7,500 reports of fly-tipping and investigated more than five thousand of them, resulting in the issuing of more than a thousand warnings and fixed penalty notices.

The team also dealt with more than 700 reports of littering, almost 200 reports of graffiti and more than 580 reported abandoned vehicles.

Like many areas across the country, the summer of last year also saw a significant increase in littering across the borough with evidence particularly from fast food restaurants.  Telford & Wrekin Council wrote to all drive-through restaurants to ask for their help in reducing the amount of litter. It led to a partnership with one fast food chain which involved highlighting litter hotspots near their restaurants that, in turn, was cleared in litter-picks carried out by their own staff.

The Council’s Cabinet, which meets on Thursday 18 February, is being recommended to note the successes of the past year and to approve a new fly-tipping strategy.

If approved, the new strategy would take six months to develop and would be delivered by new Community Action Teams. These new teams will work on specifically local issues within the areas of the town or parish councils funding them, match-funded by Telford & Wrekin Council. The new Action Teams will include Neighbourhood Enforcement Officers from Telford & Wrekin Council’s Public Protection Team which has recently increased resource to tackle this problem and work in partnership with town and parish councils.  Furthermore, the additional officers will focus on a wide range of issues including illegal parking, littering, dog-fouling and graffiti.

Councillor Richard Overton, Telford & Wrekin Council’s Cabinet Member for Enforcement said: “We have always adopted the principle of education first and enforcement later. Any fines or punishments have always been issued as a last resort to the persistent few who haven’t taken on board the advice, guidance, warnings and reminders.

“Our work with one fast food chain in clearing litter illustrates how we try to find better ways of keeping the borough clean without resorting straight to fines. I am very grateful to them for their help in tackling littering.

“Over the last year, we really ramped up our enforcement work to keep residents and businesses safe. We employed a number of Neighbourhood Enforcement Officers, initially to deal with parking issues, but they then moved on to work on environmental crime and anti-social behaviour. With the additional officers through the Community Action Team, our next move will be to take those experiences and successes of the last year and the best practices established during that time and put it all into a new fly-tipping strategy. 

“The new Community Action Teams will begin to appear from April 2021 and will be tasked locally by partnering Town and Parish Councils to address concerns in their areas.

“This is part of our work to protect, care and invest to create a cleaner, safer and better borough.

“Together we will ensure that our neighbourhoods continue to be great places in which to live.”