Latest news with #wastecrime
BBC News
3 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Bradford Council urges residents to clear fly-tipped waste
Persistent fly-tipping outside homes is caused by residents in some areas of Bradford and should be cleaned up by them, Bradford Council has was being dumped in some areas by the people living there, rather than people from outside the neighbourhood, council officers told a said that the authority was not obliged to keep clearing up rubbish from back streets that are not public roads and that it did not have the budget to continue doing Riaz Ahmed told the meeting: "In a lot of cases it is the public who has to make a change, not the council." A report by council officers said the repeated clean ups had put "pressure on the service"."The council assesses each site on its own merit and cannot always have a blanket approach to removal of this waste," they case should be investigated to establish any leads, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service."Resident participation in catching perpetrators of waste crime is essential, such as sharing information or assisting in the deployment of cameras," officers Hussain, Bradford East area co-ordinator, told the meeting that litter was "not people coming from outside to dump this waste"."It is sad to say but it is residents," she carrying out litter picks will be given council equipment, she council report said the fly tipping would be investigated and followed up to catch the "perpetrators of waste crime". Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North
Sky News
09-07-2025
- Sky News
Dirty work: The fly-tippers turning trash into cash
Holding up a wad of cash, Cristian smiles as he counts out £50 notes while a friend beams and waves a finger at the camera. In other videos posted on TikTok, Cristian (not his real name) and his group appear to shovel debris into what looks like an abandoned warehouse, dance by the side of a road and fly-tip on a country lane. While in person they present themselves as an ordinary collection of handymen, we suspect these men are part of a group who dump waste onto unlicensed sites. We know some of them operate as private refuse collectors, and understand at least some of the rubbish they were paid to legally dispose of ended up being fly-tipped en-masse in the countryside. This is after we found tonnes of waste left to rot in a farmer's field and a Woodland Trust site. 7:39 We tracked down Cristian and his group one morning as they climbed into vans and pick-up trucks to start their day. His name and number had been given to us by a client whose waste we found at an illegal dump site. I told him I was a Sky News journalist and that we believe the waste he had been paid to remove was dumped illegally in the countryside. "We don't do rubbish removals," he replied. I asked him if he had ever made money from fly-tipping. "I don't do rubbish in the woods," he said. When asked how he makes money, he replied "fencing". The 'new narcotics' Waste crime is a booming problem, which the former head of the Environment Agency called the 'new narcotics' for the way it allows organised criminal gangs to make huge amounts of money. It costs the UK an estimated £1bn a year - yet the crime is poorly policed, little understood, and the legal punishments are often weak. Last year, local authorities in England dealt with 1.15 million fly-tipping incidents; a 6% rise on the previous year. But just 63,000 fixed penalty notices were issued - a 5% drop on the previous 12 months - while the average court fine was worth just £530. That's despite the ability of fly-tippers to make millions of pounds in profit. Often they operate as legal waste operators - from a one-man band on Facebook or Gumtree, to a significant outfit posing as a legitimate company. They're paid to collect waste, but instead of taking it to a tip or landfill, and paying the requisite costs and taxes, they just dump it and pocket the profit. "If you put it in a field, it's free," explains Dr Anna Willetts, an environmental criminal defence lawyer. "If you take it to a Household Waste Recycling Centre or to a landfill site run by waste operators - then there's what's called a gate fee, which then has to be paid per tonne, effectively, of waste that you're depositing." Teddy bear, wedding photos and a coffin To uncover the perpetrators of this crime, Sky News spent eight weeks visiting fly-tip sites around Hertfordshire. With the permission of landowners, we focused on three locations roughly three miles apart near St Albans. The smallest had just three van loads in it - the largest around 40. Each time, the gates had been broken into overnight, and a slew of vehicles had driven across the grass. This left behind mounds of rotting waste from builders and households, as well as asbestos and clinical materials. We found everything from a child's teddy bear, to wedding photos and a coffin. Two of the sites are owned by the Woodland Trust and the largest site belongs to a farmer. Despite being the victims of this crime, it's the landowner's responsibility to pay to remove fly-tipping. In this case, the combined cost will come to tens of thousands of pounds. On site, we began to go through the dozens of piles and it didn't take long before we found a series of names and addresses. These were on documents and items as varied as Amazon boxes, wedding plans, dentist appointments and welfare applications. These individuals likely paid someone money to remove the items, expecting the waste to be dealt with properly. 'They're the bags…oh man' Charlie (not his real name) gave a huge sigh as he went through the rubbish. We called him after finding work relating to a job of his in one of the piles. In the middle of a field where locals walk their dogs, he instantly recognised the huge white and blue rubble sacks which he'd paid to have cleared. He said he felt "disappointed" and "cheated". He paid £300 to an individual we're calling Andrei to remove them a few weeks earlier. A skip would have cost the same amount of money, he says, but he trusted Andrei - who even had an official waste carrier's licence issued by the Environment Agency. Based on what Charlie paid Andrei, we calculate that each individual pile of rubbish - a van load - was probably worth around £500 to the group. They should have taken it to a tip, where they would have been charged a gate fee per tonnage and paid landfill tax. Instead, by dumping it in a field - they pocket a huge profit. We roughly calculate that just one site of 40 loads could have been worth as much as £20,000 to them in takings. In contrast, the landowner has been quoted nearly £50,000 to remove it properly. Later, another client whose items we found dumped nearby gave us a different name and number - Cristian. It didn't take long for us to realise that Andrei and Cristian were working together. How we tracked down the fly-tippers Adam Parker OSINT editor @adamparkr Sky News' Data and Forensics unit took the names given to us and soon found a group of London-based waste carriers who seem to be working together. We found the first clue in a pile of dumped building waste in a Hertfordshire field: a document with a phone number. We followed the paper trail and were given a number by a builder. Running it through open-source tools revealed a name and face. Then came another load and another number. A different name, but we had suspicions it was the same network. On Facebook, the two were friends. Their photos online were recognised by the people who hired them. On TikTok, the fly-tippers shared videos flashing cash, collecting waste and travelling in their vans. Footage showed them driving down the same remote lane as two of the fly-tips we found. They also shared a video of them playing with a coffin; we later found the exact same one dumped in a field. Using their own videos and photos shared online, we were able to track them to an address in north London - a residential parking area frequently shown in the background of their posts. A couple of large buildings nearby helped us confirm the location. Penalties 'not a deterrent' for fly-tippers Cristian denied having anything to do with the illegal fly-tipping when we confronted him, insisting that he has nothing to do with rubbish removal. The other men who featured in these videos all refused to comment. But we found enough evidence to raise significant doubt on those claims, and have passed our findings over to the authorities. Dr Willetts is frustrated by how quickly we gathered our evidence compared to the authorities. She said: "It's difficult often for regulators to catch them, and then when they are caught, penalties are - the way they're meted out, if you like, if they're not done the right way - are low, and it's not a deterrent for them." On the rare occasion fly-tippers are caught, the fines are often so small I've been told the criminals chalk it up as a "business expense". St Albans City and District Council director Chris Traill said: "Fly-tipping is a criminal offence, punishable by heavy fines and even imprisonment, and the rubbish involved can be a health hazard, harm the environment and cost a considerable sum to clear up. "When we have the necessary evidence, we will not hesitate to prosecute or fine offenders." A Department for Environment spokesperson said waste criminals have "gone unpunished for too long", adding that in April the government launched a crackdown on "cowboy waste operators". Additional reporting by Niamh Lynch and camera operator Martin Smith
BBC News
02-07-2025
- Business
- BBC News
'Significant improvement' needed to deter waste crime, says auditor
A damning report into the regulation of the waste industry here said the Northern Ireland Environment Agency's (NIEA) approach requires "significant improvement" to effectively identify and deter investigation by the Northern Ireland Audit Office found the potential profits from waste crime "far outweigh" the sanctions, and that current measures "are not achieving best value for money".It adds that waste crime could be estimated to cost around £34m per year, when costs of rectifying environmental and social harm, evaded taxes, and lost legitimate business are taken into said cleaning up illegal dumping is a "significant cost" to the public purse. The Auditor General found that no inspections to match waste materials arriving and leaving sites, or to verify waste on-site, have been conducted in the last two Carville said she had identified "underlying operational challenges" facing the NIEA, including poor data collection and management information, and recruitment said only two of the 36 legal cases taken in the past five years had resulted in environmental restoration by the defendant."The current operation of the inspection regime does not adequately identify or discourage criminality," she continued."Legal enforcement activities, even when successful, rarely result in polluters remediating the damage caused. "Furthermore, financial penalties through fines and confiscation orders are a fraction of the costs of dealing with the waste legally."She has recommended "a review of existing arrangements and inspection regimes" to ensure better value for money and more effective environmental protections for Northern report points to the Mobuoy site, which the most reliable estimate suggests will cost £107m to clean cost is expected to "largely" fall to the public sector. '300,000 tonnes of waste disposed of annually' The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera) has overall responsibility and accountability for the regulation of NIEA authorises all activities involving the treatment, movement, storage or disposal of waste and is responsible for clean-up costs when it involves hazardous waste on public land or where the volume exceeds one bin lorry load.A report commissioned in 2013 to include lessons from Mobuoy made 14 the NIEA said 13 were acted on, the Auditor's report identifies several instances where the same issues are still include not monitoring illegal sites after court cases conclude, and a lack of specialist Auditor also criticised NIEA's lack of data on the nature, source and volume of output of each waste stream it is responsible for regulating.A 2015 estimate suggested the amount of waste deposited illegally in Northern Ireland annually was 300,000 is the most recent figure available. The Daera Minister, Andrew Muir, said: "Waste crime poses a serious threat to our environment, to public health and to the integrity of our waste management systems. "It also undermines law-abiding operators and damages public confidence."He said that strengthening our environmental governance structures is a top added that it is important that "a clear response to each recommendation is formulated, published and then implemented."
BBC News
03-06-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Conference to discuss fly-tipping problem across South East
Police and crime commissioners (PCCs) across the South East have been invited to attend a conference to discuss tackling organised criminal waste dumping. According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, during 2023/24 there were 101,694 cases of fly-tipping in the South East National Audit Office estimates that illegal waste dumping, much of it organised, costs the economy more than £900m a year. Kent PCC Matthew Scott has invited colleagues Katy Bourne and Lisa Townsend - from Sussex and Surrey respectively - to discuss a problem he has called "the new county lines". Tuesday's event will also see representatives from regional organised crime units and the Environment Agency (EA) Scott said: "What this summit is about is bringing together those who have the powers like the Environment Agency and local councils to see how we can work better to tackle this criminality because, tragically, the outcomes for fly-tipping and waste crime are very low."In the two years up until December, the EA received 3,407 incident reports of suspected criminal activity, such as dumping and burning waste, in the South East scale fly tipping is punishable with a fine of up to £50,000 or 12 months imprisonment if convicted in a magistrates' court, or an unlimited fine and up to five years' imprisonment if convicted in a crown court. The conference will be held at the Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council building in Kings Hill, Kent.
