‘Prosecution’ pledge as part of Preston fly-tipping crackdown

Preston City Council says it intends to “make an example” of those it is able to prove have illegally dumped rubbish in public spaces.

It comes after a funding boost for waste enforcement work was included in the council’s budget back in March.

A recent meeting of the full council heard that the extra £57,000 invested in efforts to combat fly-tipping and other forms of littering was already being spent.

Cabinet member for environment and community safety Freddie Bailey said residents should be starting to see the benefit of the authority’s renewed focus on the problem.

He said in order to get to work on the issue as soon as possible, the council had initially brought in agency staff who were targeting parts of the city where unlawful waste disposal was known to be particularly prevalent.

Ultimately, the council's own in-house team will be bolstered with new staff, which Cllr Bailey said he hoped would result in “even [more] of an impact”.

He was responding to a question from former fellow cabinet member Carol Henshaw, who described the dumping of rubbish as an ongoing “blight on our lovely city”.

Cllr Bailey said the authority was “looking at ways of how we can prosecute people”.

“Sometimes it can be quite difficult, because obviously we’re looking for evidence of what they have fly-tipped and then [have to] track that back to the source.

“We want to work on trying to prosecute…the culprits that are fly-tipping so that we, in a way…can make an example of them - [and] show we are actually being as productive and proactive as possible,” he explained.

He said some proactive enforcement work had already been carried out in conjunction with the police earlier this year in the New Hall Lane area, where vehicles had been pulled over and searched.

“We did random stops of vans in areas of high fly-tipping to see what [people have] actually got in the back,” Cllr Bailey said.