Fly tipping facts, news, stories, articles & industry insight.
A waste carriers licence is not a plastic card, akin to a driver’s licence. It is a paper certificate issued by the relevant government body. For the avoidance of doubt, this will be:
England – Environmental Agency (EA)
Wales – Natural Resources Wales (NRW)
Scotland – Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA)
Northern Ireland – Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA)
Applications for a waste carriers licence in Northern Ireland are managed by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA).
Under law, the definition of a waste carrier in Northern Ireland is “a person who transports controlled waste which that person has not produced themselves, to or from any place in Northern Ireland in the course of any business of his or otherwise with a view to profit.”
In Scotland, anybody that wishes to store, trade in or dispose of waste must register for a Waste Management Licence through the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA).
There are two types of licence available – one for the static treatment of waste at a site (a broker), and one for anybody that plans to move waste between different locations (a carrier).
By law, it is legal to transport personal waste without charge in England and Wales. If you carry, dispose of or trade in waste on behalf of somebody else though, especially as part of a business model, you will need an upper tier waste carriers licence.
This licence costs £154 (the lower tier licence is free, but restricted to non-commercial household waste), and must be renewed every 3 years at an additional charge of £105. You must also renew your waste carriers licence if your circumstances change, such as moving to a new address. If you switch a business model involving waste from a sole trader to a limited company, you must apply for an entirely new licence.
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Marie Lane, from Rake Gate Tenants and Residents’ Association in Grove, Wolverhampton, teamed up with Sue Roberts Wolverhampton’s Councillor. The pair managed to round thousands of pounds in funding to get 50 skips in just for a day to clean up the community.
Ms Lane, aged 56, said “Fly-tipping was really becoming a problem so I applied to the Police and Crime Commissioner’s office and we received £5,000. We also used all the money in the residents association account – we’re skint now. It’s so great to see it all clean though, and obviously I hope it stays that way,”.
Harrow Council wants landowners to take responsibility for refuse left on their property after a spate of fly-tipping incidents behind their shops.
People living in Mollison Way, Edgware, were “sick and disgusted” by the amount of rubbish being dumped in the area.
A local property owner said “ There were serious safety concerns about what was accumulating as it was attracting vermin. It was going from bad to worse and, if it carries on this way, it will be absolutely disastrous,”.
Expect a Miracle, a house clearance & rubbish removal company based in Byfleet, Surrey, got on the wrong side of the law and, instead of miracle, found themselves liable for fines and costs of £785. The company was prosecuted by Woking Borough Council for two breaches of Sections 33 and 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.
Expect a Miracle were paid by a resident to dispose of some household rubbish. But the rubbish turned up dumped in a residential street. The council traced Expect a Miracle but when officers checked the register of licenses held by the Environment Agency, the company’s name did not appear.
Residents tipped off Malvern Hills District Council about a large amount of rubbish that had been dumped in the countryside near a garden centre just outside of Worcester. When council officers investigated, they reckoned that the waste, which included carpets, old furniture and papers, would have filled a tipper lorry.
The officers were able trace the rubbish to a Bromsgrove based company, Home and Gardens 4 U Limited. One of the company’s workers admitted that a house clearance had been carried out at a residential property in Worcester. Disposal of waste had been sub-contracted to another company, but Home and Gardens 4 U were unable to provide any information about it.
Dumping 46 bags of builders’ waste on a picturesque country lane near Droitwich Spa in Worcestershire cost Joshua Sankey (20) of Sutton Road, Kidderminster and Rocky Smith (28) of Teme Crescent, Droitwich a total of more than £2,000.
Sankey had been contracted to undertake a house clearance at a property in Worcester. But instead of disposing of the rubbish properly, he dumped it on a country road between the villages of Doverdale and Hampton Lovett. This resulted in Wychavon District Council taking Sankey to court.
Justina Cereskaite (29) of Theydon Grove, Epping had some rubbish she needed to get rid of, too much to put in the usual rubbish collection. When she saw a man-with-a-van advertising on Gumtree, she thought she’d found the answer to her problem.
Ms. Cereskaite, a professional photographer originally from Lithuania, contacted the man and a he duly showed up at her home to take the rubbish away. She though he would dispose of it responsibly and paid him £50.
William Eric Pipes (39) of Danebury Drive, York thought he could get away with dumping builders’ waste on a private drive and near a children’s playground. Pipes faced 19 charges of fly-tipping and unlicensed waste collection at York Crown Court in December 2017.
Pipes had been employed by a plumbing firm to get rid of waste from fitting new bathrooms. The plumbers had been under the impression that Pipes was a licensed operator and had paid him in cash. But debris from the bathrooms turned up around Thoresby Road in York during February and March of 2017. Dumped items included broken baths, toilets, sinks and tiles.
Of the many people who are caught illegally fly-tipping up and down the length of the country, it has to be said that Billy Prince (34) is not the brightest of the bunch. Prince decided to dump a van-load of waste at a Thurrock Council owned street cleaning depot off Stanford Road, in Stanford-le-Hope, Essex. The rubbish included old office furniture and flooring.
Imran Bham must have believed that he had got away scot-free with fly-tipping a load of rubbish in November 2016. He used his white transit van to ditch the waste in the Bradford neighbourhoods of Wilsden, Heating and Bowling.
But what Bham didn’t know was that somebody had taken a clear photograph of him standing talking on his phone next to his van, just after he’d dumped one of his loads of rubbish. The photograph found its way into the hands of Bradford environmental enforcement officers. Although they could read the van’s registration in the photo, it turned out that it was uninsured and not registered in anyone’s name.
A Brighton entrepreneur who set up a house clearance business has come a cropper at a cost to his own wallet of nearly £4,000. Daniel Brennan (30) of 17 St Cuthmans Close, Brighton launched a company called Sussex House and Rubbish Clearance and advertised the firm as a waste disposal service.
But instead of disposing of rubbish that he picked up from residential addresses, construction sites and pubs responsibly, Brennan simply dumped everything that he collected on the streets of Brighton. Dumped waste included everything from builders’ rubble to sofas, beer kegs and refrigerators.
Staff at the H.W. Taroni scrapyard in Aston, Birmingham had the pleasure in October 2017 of crushing no less than three vans that had been seized from illegal fly-tippers. Two of the vehicles were transit vans, the property of Andrew Smithson of Cranleigh Place, Perry Barr. He ran a company called A and R Removals which advertised for business on the internet.
Earlier in 2017, Smithson had pleaded guilty at Birmingham Crown Court to nine charges of fly-tipping contrary to the Environmental Protection Act 1990, plus charges of fraud, forgery and breaches of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013. He was sentenced to 30 months in jail and handed a 51-month driving ban.
A new breed of unlicensed waste disposal criminals have been dubbed the “Facebook fly-tippers”. Typically, these are one- or two-man operations, often called “a man with a van” and now they’ve taken to Facebook to advertise their unlawful services.
And unwary members of the public can end up with fines and a criminal record if they use one of these Facebook fly-tippers, even if they do so unwittingly. It is in fact the responsibility of a householder who is disposing of waste to ensure that any carrier they use has all the requisite licences to dispose of waste. Whether its garden waste, old furniture or building rubble, the individual getting rid of the rubbish is responsible for its final disposal.
Andrew Issacs, 33, of Westbury Lane, Coombe Dingle and Kemar Lewis, 29, of Havilland House, St Judes appeared before North Avon Magistrates’ Court charged with illegal fly-tipping and failing to supply waste transfer notes. An operation mounted by Avon & Somerset Police and South Gloucestershire Council officers led to the men being arrested and charged.
The two men had been running a waste disposal firm under two names, Andrew & Sons House Clearance and Bristol Rubbish Clearance. They were contracted to remove a quantity of waste including derelict sheds from an address in St Andrews, Bristol but the waste was dumped in a country lane near the village of Tormarton, 15 miles from Bristol.
A brazen house clearance fly-tipper has been handed a 12-month prison sentence at Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court. George Smith (40) was caught not once but three times on film using tipper trucks to dump rubbish in Croydon streets.
Prosecutor Simon Kiely told the court, “Between February 12 and April 11 2016, George Smith committed four fly-tips within the Borough of Croydon. These fly-tips all involved the repeated dumping of large amounts of controlled waste in residential areas, and regularly involved entire loads of waste, both loose and inside plastic or polythene sacks, dumped from the back of a tipper truck.”
Smith had one tipper truck seized by officers from the London Borough of Croydon. But he persisted in his fly-tipping with a second vehicle which was also seized by the council. The council later crushed both vehicles.
Plumber Neil Bishop, 44, of Millwood End, Long Hanborough in West Oxfordshire thought he could get away with some surreptitious fly-tipping. But what he didn’t know was that a concealed spy camera was watching his every move. The camera had been installed by officers from Cherwell District Council
And what the camera recorded led Bishop to an appearance at Bicester Magistrates’ Court where he was fined £750 and landed with a costs bill of £440.
Confronted with the damning footage, Bishop had little choice but to plead guilty to fly-tipping and to a charge of carrying waste without a licence.