THE TRUTH ABOUT FLY TIPPING

It’s not often that I find myself in agreement with our intrepid leader Cllr Kieran Quinn, but fear thee not readers, by the time I got to the fourth paragraph of his latest blog, I reverted to my usual position of thinking, 'what a wazzock!'

For those who have not had the time or inclination to visit Kieran’s blog, he was telling how much he gets so annoyed by the mess caused by a few inconsiderate people who would rather dump their rubbish than dispose of it properly.

Apparently, he can’t tolerate mess, whether it’s at his home or in the community, “it gets on his nerves and it particularly annoys him that councillors and staff have had to deal with several cases of fly-tipping over Christmas.”

Now, at Christmas, it’s been suggested that we generate around 30% more waste than normal!

Understandable too; especially in households with children whose Christmas presents seem to need rolls of wrapping paper and in the main these days, delivered in large cardboard boxes.

Armed with this knowledge, one would have thought that the council’s waste collection

Standard issue for most councillors

schedules would have been rearranged to accommodate this extra tonnage, but no, in our area it was Monday 12 January 2015 before the full to bursting ‘blue (paper & cardboard) bin’ was emptied.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t condone fly tipping, but if the council cannot get its act together to shift the excess at a time of year that sees mountains of empty boxes discarded, then some people will resort to dumping it elsewhere.

However, it was the councillor’s next statement that had me reaching for my calculator!

He said, “This dumping is nothing short of an environmental crime but more than that, the actions of this selfish minority cost us an absolute fortune. Last year the council had to spend £300,400.00 clearing up 768 tonnes of litter and fly-tipping, at a time when we are having our funding slashed to the bone it is galling in the extreme to have to spend so much on anti-social activity which could be avoided so easily.”

Now let’s be honest, we have a lot of pretty gullible voters in Tameside, who unfortunately believe every word our career councillors utter without question. So let’s just look at those figures again.

As it stands, the current Landfill Tax is £80.00 per tonne. (Source: HMRC – 2012) A figure confirmed by Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority (GMWDA -2014) and also by their recycling and waste contractor, Viridor Laing (2014)

Now, it may be that the Executive Leader could be suffering from a disability known as developmental dyscalculia, or maybe the council calculator has the equivalent of a ‘Fergie Time’ button where figures are spewed out at random by some spurious inbuilt algorithm or more likely that Tameside are paying way over the odds, but if, as the Executive Leader tells us, our ‘local heroes’ cleared 768 tonnes of illegal rubbish, and dumped it at one of GMWDA’s facilities, it should only have cost £61,440  (768 tonnes  x £80.00 per tonne = £61,440)

Still a lot of money, but a lot less than £300,400 – in fact £238,960 less!

Jumping back to his usual default stance of complaining about ‘budget cuts’ he then told us “Whatever your views I’m sure we can all agree that this is money could be better spent. By my reckoning, if we had no dumping to deal with we could afford several social workers. If you asked me to pick between the two, well, I think the answer is pretty obvious.”

Alternatively councillor, why not look at the problem from a different angle.

In July 2014, the maximum fine for fly-tipping was increased to £3m for companies and £95,000 for individuals.

Even low-level offending could attract fines of up to £10,000, and people who break the law could serve up to three years in jail.

That being the case, our local heroes would only need to catch 1 person fly-tipping and issue them with the maximum fine and the entire outlay for clearing all 768 tonnes of rubbish would not only be eradicated, but our council would be £33,560 in profit and able to employ yet another 'social worker'!

So, how many fly tippers did our local heroes catch?

How many were prosecuted and what were the total fines collected?

Now if I'm being unfair or my figures are indeed wrong, no doubt our leader (or one of his lackey’s) will avail himself of my comments facility, but I won’t hold my breath!