A man from Hayes has been fined £1,000 for dumping rubbish on a roadside in Buckinghamshire.
The man, who has avoided court action and retained anonymity by admitting to the offence and paying a £1,000 fixed penalty, dumped the rubbish on Black Park Road in Wexham on July 22.
He described it as “gardening” waste from his business that he had taken out of his van to make “space for collecting furniture”.
This year, Buckinghamshire Council became the first in the country to ask the public for dashcam or mobile phone footage of people tossing rubbish from car windows as part of a campaign to crack down on fly-tipping.
It currently makes around 30 prosecutions a year for the offence and collects around £50,000 in fines annually – money which is ring-fenced to be spent only on enforcement and clean-up operations.
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The local authority also raised its maximum fixed penalty notice for the offence from £400 to £1,000 last year in the hopes of tackling a record-breaking rise in the number of recorded incidents between 2022 and 2023.
Speaking in May, council leader Martin Tett said he would like to see the number of fines handed out for fly-tipping rise significantly in the coming years.
Adding: “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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