A man has been fined £1,000 for dumping five sacks of rubbish on a roadside he thought was an ‘open dump’.
The man from Slough has paid the fixed penalty notice after fly-tipping the household waste on Billet Lane in Iver on July 25.
He had reportedly tried to drop it off at the Slough and Langley Household Recycling Centres (HRC) but found them shut during his visit at 8pm.
Rather than dropping the five bags off at an HRC for free, he had decided to leave them in Iver, in an area he thought was “an open dump”.
Buckinghamshire Council officers traced the fly-tipped waste to him through linking its contents to his name and place of residence.
While paying the fixed notice meant he avoided facing prosecutors in court, the Slough native was handed the maximum penalty enforceable by local councils of £1,000.
It’s not the first time Billet Lane has been targeted by fly-tippers – Thames Valley Police increased its patrols in Iver last summer after a spate of incidents including a sofa being dumped on the side of the road.
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The council makes around 30 prosecutions a year for fly-tipping and collects around £50,000 in fines annually.
In April, it became the first local authority to ask the public for dashcam footage or legally recorded mobile phone footage of people tossing rubbish from car windows.
Speaking in May, council leader Martin Tett he would like to see the number of fines handed out for the offence rise significantly in the coming years.
He said: “Fly-tipping has been a passion of mine going back something like 12, 13 years. It really aggravates our residents.
“People hate seeing it on the side of the road. It can be a sofa, an old fridge, it can be all sorts of things.
“There is no excuse for that behaviour. There is absolutely no excuse.”
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