'It's got to be stopped' - why are people getting fly-tipping penalties?
WISE began a 12-month trial in Broxtowe in April, and residents there have already been complaining that they feel they have been unfairly accused of fly-tipping.They include Frank Brown, who said he had been asked to pay £500 because he left two bags of sand - which he was still using - on a grass verge in Chilwell.Frank's FPN has now been cancelled following publicity about his case this week, but he is concerned other people are being "bullied" into paying."I think it's outrageous; it's definitely got to be stopped," said Frank.Other cases include a man in nearby Bramcote, who was asked to pay £1,000 because he left a bag of garden waste on a grass verge before taking it to the tip.Adam Castledine said his encounter with the WISE officers was "baffling"."They seemed a bit heavy-handed for a bag of garden waste," he said. "You would think it was nuclear waste the way things were going on."So why are people receiving these demands for money, and what should people do?
What does WISE do?
WISE is a private company, which works with councils across England to enforce environmental and anti-social behaviour offences, including littering, dog fouling, fly-tipping and fly-posting.Offences like these were traditionally enforced by council staff, but some authorities now use contractors such as WISE in order to save money.On its website, WISE says it offers its services using a "cost-neutral model", which means the council does not have to pay anything.Instead, WISE makes money by retaining some of the revenue from FPNs.On its website, it claims to have "an impressive 79% payment rate".
Is it an offence to leave out scrap?
Anna said she had left her broken bench on a pavement next to her garden gate.She said her husband had arranged for a scrap man to collect it - and the scrap man has confirmed to the BBC that this was the case.However, two WISE officers spotted the bench before the scrap man had a chance to pick it up. Anna was not at home when the officers knocked on her door, so they initially spoke to her mother."They said they were placing her under caution for fly-tipping and she had to pay a £500 fine," said Anna."My mum felt very intimidated, she didn't know who these people were."Anna then returned home and spoke to the WISE officers herself, along with the scrap man and his colleague, who had arrived to collect the bench.In a video filmed by the scrap man, he told the WISE officers he had put the bench in his truck and was taking it away. But despite this, Anna received a £500 FPN in the post accusing her of fly-tipping.Michael Orlik, a solicitor who specialises in highways, said temporarily leaving scrap on a pavement could be an offence under the Environmental Protection Act 1990."The legislation does not say that the waste can be left in the street, for however short a period," he said.However, he said the fine would likely be very small if someone were to be convicted in court."I think that the magistrates would impose a nominal fine, but this has to be speculation," he said.
Is leaving garden waste on a verge illegal?
Adam left a bag of garden waste on a grass verge next to his back gate.He said he had planned to take it to the tip but the bag was too heavy to lift into his car, so he was waiting for a neighbour to help him.It had been there for a day and a half when two WISE officers knocked at his door."They were almost like doormen-type people, just going on about all these laws, saying I could be in a lot of trouble," said Adam.Adam said he asked if they could help him lift the bag into his car, but they declined, so he dragged it back into his garden.The officers returned the following day, when there was nobody at home, then again the day after, when they issued Adam's wife with a £1,000 fixed penalty notice for fly-tipping."I can't see how it's fly-tipping," Adam said. "I get clamping down on fly-tipping when people are dumping beer bottles and mattresses and stuff, but that just seems ludicrous."Michael Orlik said temporarily leaving a bag of garden waste on a verge could be an offence under the Environmental Protection Act 1990.However, he said the fine would likely be nominal if the case went to court.
Can people challenge the FPNs?
FPNs are sometimes referred to as "fines", but they are intended to be an alternative to prosecution for minor offences.They offer people the option of paying the fixed penalty, and therefore discharging their liability for the offence, rather than being taken to court and potentially getting a criminal record.People can appeal against their FPNs by contacting WISE, but Anna said she had had difficulties getting a response."I've tried several times to ring them, couldn't get through to anybody, I got an answer machine telling me that their message box was full and couldn't take any more messages," she said.She emailed WISE but said it had taken eight days for anyone to respond."I received a response to the email telling me they want proof it was a booked-in scrap collection, proof of the scrap man's licences and all the paperwork, which I don't have," she said."You don't get a receipt for a scrap collection, most people just leave it outside."People can ultimately challenge FPNs by not paying them and waiting to see if they get taken to court.However, the fly-tipping FPNs issued by WISE warn people: "The maximum penalty at a magistrates court for this offence is £50,000."This has worried Adam, who does not know what to do.He said: "I assume it's going to have to be paid or fought in court, but if a judge gets out the wrong side of bed and sides with them, who has got £50,000?" However, Michael Orlik said the wording on the FPNs was misleading,"The notice says that the maximum fine is £50,000, which is correct, but that sort of fine would not be imposed by a court for a minor offence," he said."The notice is intended to intimidate people into paying up. It should say that the maximum fine in the most serious cases is £50,000."
What has WISE said?
The BBC contacted both Broxtowe Borough Council and WISE, and a joint statement was issued in response.It said the council had partnered with the environmental enforcement agency "to deal with fly-tipping and littering across the borough"."This collaborative effort is in direct response to feedback from residents during the annual budget consultation process, highlighting concerns over declining street cleanliness," it added."Despite previous initiatives focused on education and community engagement, the council recognised that more targeted action is necessary to maintain the cleanliness of the borough."The BBC asked how the money from the FPNs was split.In response, the statement said: "The financial information contained within the contract is commercially sensitive information and therefore, we are unable to disclose this information."On appeals against FPNs, the statement added: "If residents are dissatisfied with the decision, they can submit a representation through WISE and ask that the council review."This challenge will then be reviewed by senior officers at the council."The statement said the council and WISE were unable to comment on individual cases."However, the council remains committed to listening to feedback from residents throughout the trial period of the arrangement, which will be reviewed after 12 months," they added.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News
36 minutes ago
- Sky News
Mother reveals how she created fake Snapchat account to help catch paedophile who targeted daughter
A mother has revealed how she created a fake Snapchat account to help put a paedophile behind bars after he started messaging her daughter. Sarah's eight-year-old daughter Nicki was playing the online game MovieStarPlanet when she began receiving messages from someone claiming to be a 17-year-old boy. Speaking to Sky News presenter Sarah-Jane Mee on The UK Tonight, Nicki said: "It was just someone starting off a normal conversation saying 'hi, how are you?'. And then it just started getting weirder... he was saying that I looked really sexy sometimes. And as I was an eight-year-old, I didn't really recognise that word... so then I went straight to my mum because it didn't look normal to me." The person messaging her, who it later turned out was a man in his 30s, had also repeatedly asked Nicky to speak to him on the social media app Snapchat - despite the fact her profile on MovieStarPlanet clearly said she was eight. Remembering the moment her daughter showed her the messages, Nicki's mother Sarah said: "I won't lie, initially I genuinely did think it was just a 17-year-old boy, you know, just sort of pushing his luck, if you will. "We deleted the account [on the game]. We made her a brand new account... and then 12 hours later, ping! He found her again." Sarah then decided to create a Snapchat account in her daughter's name before adding the person who had approached her on the game. She decided not to include any photos of her daughter on the account. However, Sarah continued: "He understood who it was straight away and the conversation continued... s o then, if you will, I became Nicki for about five days." Sarah says a "major red flag" occurred when the person started sending videos and pictures. "I was well aware that that was no 16 to 17-year-old boy. This was prior to us seeing a full facial image. Luckily enough, he sent that as well, which made it a lot easier to identify this as a fully-grown man." Sarah continued: "Knowing what he wanted from her, what he wanted to do to her. He was very explicit in telling me what he wanted her to do... it encouraged me to continue knowing that I can't let him do this to her or any other child, that I have to ensure that I stop him." The paedophile, who Sky News has chosen not to name, ended up serving eight months in prison after he was convicted in August 2023 - three years after he sent the messages. Nicki said she started crying when she was told the predator had been jailed. She added: "It was kind of relief and obviously joy... it was just amazing." Nicki said she often overhears pupils at her school talking about how they are chatting to people online who they don't really know. She said: "You just kind of think, well, is that not a bit of a stupid idea? Because obviously you've never met him... If a friend came up to me, then I'd actually have the conversation with them. You know, [tell them] that could be someone completely different to who they say they are." What have Snapchat and MovieStarPlanet said? A spokesperson for Snapchat said: "Any sexual exploitation of young people is abhorrent and illegal. We designed Snapchat with extra protections for teens - including private friend lists, pop-up warnings if they start to chat with someone we think they don't know and easy reporting tools so teens can get help quickly. "You must be at least 13 to use Snapchat and we also have Family Centre for parents, which allows them to see who their teen is talking with and when they last chatted." A spokesperson for MovieStarPlanet said: "First, and foremost, our thoughts go out to the family involved in these incidents and we wish them well in their recovery process. "As a registered social worker, professionally working to safeguard children, my main focus is to make sure there are comprehensive safeguarding systems in place to protect children and adolescents who engage with the online games that we produce. "This is also the main focus of everyone at MovieStarPlanet where we work with a safety by design philosophy when creating and producing our online games. MovieStarPlanet is committed to providing a safe and enjoyable online experience for everyone that engages with the online games that we produce. "We have implemented a comprehensive set of child safeguarding measures designed to protect our users from potential risks and promote civility through positive interactions. We continually assess and upgrade these systems when it is deemed necessary."
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Man, 27, is charged with three counts of rape after woman was 'attacked in park'
A man has been charged with rape after a woman was 'attacked in a park'. The victim was allegedly attacked at Sutton Lawn, Sutton-in-Ashfield between 9pm and 10pm on Sunday, June 29. Specially trained officers supported the victim while a team of detectives began an investigation. Sheraz Malik, 27, of Bath Street, Sutton Ashfield has been charged with three counts of rape and possesion of cannabis. He appeared at Nottingham Magistrates' Court on Tuesday, July 22, and was remanded in custody until 19 August 2025. Detective Inspector Nicole Milner, of Nottinghamshire Police, said: 'The victim continues to be supported by officers and has been informed about this important development in our investigation. 'We know the incident caused concern in the Sutton-in-Ashfield area.' Investigations continue into the incident and anyone who has any relevant information should call 101, quoting incident 19 of 30 June 2025, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Ozzy Osbourne, the people's Prince of Darkness, took heavy metal into the light
As he would doubtless have admitted, the teenage John Michael 'Ozzy' Osbourne did not seem much like someone with a glittering future ahead of them. His childhood had been troubled – he struggled at school, partly as a result of dyslexia, and suffered sexual abuse at the hands of two older bullies – and his prospects after leaving school aged 15 seemed non-existent. Even his attempts to become a criminal ended in farce. He was, he later noted, 'fucking useless' as a burglar: a television he was attempting to steal fell on top of him; operating in the dark, he inadvertently stole a selection of baby clothes rather than the adult garments he had intended to sell around the pubs of his native Aston in Birmingham. Finally, he was caught and sent to prison for six weeks. 'OZZY ZIG NEEDS A GIG' read the card he left in the window of a local music shop, and 'need' seems to have been the operative word: by the time he joined a heavy blues rock band called Earth as vocalist, he was out of other options. It wasn't even as if Earth, or Black Sabbath as they became, offered an obvious ticket to fame and fortune: their big idea to advance their career involved loading their van up with equipment, then driving it to other artists' gigs uninvited, sitting outside on the off-chance that one of the bands performing pulled out and they could fill in. And when Osbourne opened his mouth to sing, you didn't need to know about his dismal CV to realise life hadn't dealt him a great hand. His voice was a desolate, unschooled wail, best suited to delivering songs that fitted the definition of rock'n'roll once offered by Dr Feelgood's late frontman Lee Brilleaux: 'Music about sod's law and bad luck.' The creation myth of Black Sabbath – and therefore of heavy metal, the genre they more or less invented singlehanded – is that it was a brilliantly canny piece of branding on the part of drummer Bill Ward: if people queued up to see horror films, why not create a rock equivalent? Black Sabbath certainly arrived fully formed – every one of the musical elements that made them legendary is perfectly in place on the eponymous opening track of their eponymous 1970 debut album – but the music they came up with in response to Ward's idea felt organic, not calculated. Black Sabbath sounded like a product of their environment: a grim, provincial, industrial world, where the drugs associated with the hippy counterculture had arrived, but not the freedoms or opportunities enjoyed by London's bohemian elite. And they sounded like a product of their era. If one response to the end of the 60s party was to be found in the wistful, delicate morning-after melancholy of 1970's biggest-selling album, Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, then Black Sabbath provided another: music that seemed as if it was lumbering angrily around with the kind of monstrous hangover that feels more like a nervous breakdown, suffused with dark thoughts, alienation, self-hatred and paranoia. Their debut still carried hints of the heavy blues band they had been – side two in particular sounds like a kind of curdled Cream – but by the time of 1970's Paranoid, they had honed their style into something entirely unique. It was hugely successful – quadruple platinum in the US – but, as with every early Black Sabbath album, critically reviled in a way that now seems scarcely believable: 'The worst of the counterculture on a plastic platter … bullshit … dull and decadent … dim-witted, amoral exploitation,' opined American writer Robert Christgau of the band. Their reception set the tone for the way heavy metal as a genre would be dismissed by 'serious' rock critics for decades to come, but there was a curious sense in which it worked in Sabbath's favour, turning them into the people's band, who connected with a vast audience of disaffected teenagers ('the kid down the block … slumped in his bedroom gorged on Tuinal … finding justification for his cancerous apathy,' as one contemporary writer characterised their fans) without the aid of the media. Osbourne bolstered that image himself. For all the dark mythology that surrounded the band – they seem to have spent a significant portion of the early 70s explaining to journalists that they weren't actually satanists – he cut a curiously unstudied figure on stage. Watch the YouTube footage of the band performing at the California Jam festival in April 1974 and what's striking is the disparity between the way they sound – monstrously heavy and dark – and the way Osbourne looks. No moody scowling or sullen posturing: he strips his shirt off, jumps up and down excitedly, claps along, raises his hands to the sky and waves his arms in delight. He behaves remarkably like a member of the audience who's been allowed on stage and can't quite believe his luck: in an era of rarefied rock gods preening, here was a rock star whose every move suggested he was just like you. The California Jam footage arguably captures Black Sabbath at their peak. The following year, Sabotage brought to an end a run of virtually flawless albums: Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Osbourne considered leaving the band during the recording of 1976's Technical Ecstasy, a confused attempt to expand their sound in the face of a changing musical climate – he toyed with starting a new band called Blizzard of Ozz – but instead found himself fired after the release of its underwhelming follow-up Never Say Die! His bandmates blamed drink and drug-related unreliability, Osbourne insisted that he was no more indulgent than the others. Whatever the truth, even Osbourne himself seemed to regard his sacking as the end of his musical career: he holed up in an LA hotel room, apparently intent on spending his severance pay on alcohol and drugs in the belief that 'after this I'm going back to Birmingham and the dole'. He reckoned without the intervention of the formidable Sharon Levy, sent to LA by her father, Black Sabbath's manager Don, to keep an eye on the singer. The pair not only became romantically involved, marrying in 1982, they proceeded to pull off a dramatic reinvention of Osbourne's career, hinging on a happy accident and an inspired idea. The happy accident was Osbourne stumbling across a virtually unknown guitarist called Randy Rhoads. In Rhoads' retelling of the story, Osbourne was so drunk at his audition that he hired him after only hearing him tune up. The inspired idea was to embrace the kind of negative attention that Black Sabbath had always attempted to dismiss. By the early 80s, heavy metal was a hugely successful musical genre. As its stock rose, so did the attention paid to the kind of lyrical themes that Black Sabbath had once specialised in. In the US in particular, rightwing conservatives and Christian fundamentalists created a mini-industry in taking self-evidently preposterous metal lyrics at face value and detecting inferences that were clearly completely unintentional. If heavy metal was now deemed an authentic threat to public morality rather than escapist entertainment, was Osbourne and Arden's thinking, then the genre's co-creator should be an embodiment of outrage. Out went the excitable frontman who was just like you. In came Ozzy Osbourne, cartoonish Prince of Darkness, who bit the head off a dove during a record company sales convention, then repeated the trick on stage in Des Moines, Iowa, this time with a live bat; took all his clothes off and dipped his testicles in a glass of wine at a dinner with his German label bosses; and urinated on the Alamo Cenotaph. It wasn't entirely clear whether Osbourne himself was working to some brilliant self-publicising masterplan or just a raging alcoholic doing ridiculous things because he was pissed, but either way, the attendant controversy sent his popularity skyward, helped by the fact that his first two solo albums, 1980's Blizzard of Ozz and 1981's Diary of a Madman, were infinitely better records than anyone who had encountered Osbourne towards the end of his tenure with Sabbath would have believed he was capable of making. His voice was apparently unaffected by the abuse he visited upon his body. Rhoads was a lavishly gifted guitarist, his classical training – most obvious on Diary of a Madman's title track – shifting his playing away from the blues-based style that had dominated hard rock in the 70s, presaging the way heavy metal would move in the 80s. The songs they came up with were more varied than the cartoon imagery would suggest: the most obvious influence on Goodbye to Romance was Osbourne's beloved Beatles in their psychedelic prime. The albums and the outrage made Osbourne so famous as a solo star, he seemed weirdly impregnable. Nothing, it appeared, could dent his success. Not the death of Rhoads in a 1982 plane crash, nor the noticeable decline in quality of Osbourne's albums – 1982's pointless collection of re-recorded Black Sabbath songs Speak of the Devil, the full-bore glam metal of 1983's Bark at the Moon – nor his increasing addiction problems. He sounded rejuvenated by the arrival of guitarist Zakk Wylde on 1988's No Rest for the Wicked and 1991's No More Tears, but in between was arrested for attempted murder after strangling his wife, Sharon, during a drink and drug binge. He subsequently emerged from rehab – his marriage, incredibly, still intact – but remained an uneven recording artist for the rest of his life. Genuinely great albums – including 2001's underrated Down to Earth, reunited with Wylde and with a pre-Metallica Robert Trujillo on bass – shared space in his discography with wan efforts such as 1995's hopelessly overproduced Ozzmosis, and stuff that lurked somewhere inbetween, a category in which you might reasonably place Black Sabbath's Rick Rubin-produced reunion album 13. You could never have accused Osbourne of shying away from the unexpected, whether it was experimenting with Auto-Tune on 2022's Patient Number 9, or offering up a remarkably faithful version of John Lennon's distinctly soppy Woman on 2005's Under Cover. Again, the mixed quality of his output did nothing to affect his standing. His celebrity was boosted by reality show The Osbournes, which elevated him to national treasure status, something it was hard to imagine happening in the years when his audience was held to be Tuinal-gorged losers scarred by the cancer of apathy. And perhaps more importantly, under Sharon Osbourne's aegis, he fully embraced his Godfather of Metal tag, presiding over the scores of younger artists who appeared at his annual Ozzfest tours – and, finally, his poignant farewell with the all-star Back to the Beginning concert, just three weeks ago. The sheer number of artists who turned out to pay homage in Villa Park was astonishing: it said everything about the regard in which the band and its frontman were held by the metal community. However much heavy metal has changed and developed over the last 56 years, it's very difficult to imagine how it might have turned out had Black Sabbath not existed. Every artist who chose to work in the genre thereafter – and indeed umpteen artists that didn't – carries something of Black Sabbath in their DNA, and one suspects they always will. It's equally hard to imagine Black Sabbath making anything like the impact they did without Ozzy Osbourne. 'I always thought that whatever I had was temporary,' he wrote in his autobiography I Am Ozzy, a line that perhaps harks back to his desperate pre-Sabbath early years. The exact opposite proved to be true.
