Barnet Council - The Flytippers Paradise

As someone who cares passionately about my manor and the green belt, scenes like this really upset me.

Old mattresses dumped at Arrendene Open Space

 The disgusting anti social idiots who use the green belt as their private dumping ground make me sick. Every act like this costs you and me, the honest and decent citizens of Barnet money.

The council has to spend an absolute fortune on cleaning this crap up. If you have old waste like this, Barnet Council operate a facility at Summers Lane Finchley, where you can simply take this rubbish and they will dispose of it free of charge. This particular scene at Arrendene is approx 10 mins drive from Summers Lane, so it is clear that the ignorant morons who did this were just too lazy to bother driving up the road to Summers Lane. There really is no excuse.

So you may wonder what you should do if you see someone flytipping in the London Borough of Barnet. The Council Website has a page with instructions - http://www.barnet.gov.uk/info/930241/flytipping/280/flytipping and it says

Flytipping

Flytipping is the illegal dumping of waste.

You can help improve your environment and report incidents of flytipping by contacting us. Please make a note of the exact location. All flytipping reported on public land will be cleared within 24 hours.

If you witness an incident of flytipping we advise you not to put yourselves at risk.
Do not approach the person. Make a note of the vehicle registration number and the date and time of the incident and contact us with this information. We can then investigate.
Flytipping can vary in scale significantly, from a bin bag of rubbish to larger quantities of waste dumped from trucks. This sort of waste can be found anywhere, such as roadsides, in lay bys or on private land. The council will take action against anyone found to be fly tipping within the borough under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 for which there is an unlimited fine and possible imprisonment.

The website also gives contact details

Address:
North London Business Park (NLBP), Oakleigh Road South, London N11 1NP
Tel: 020 8359 4600
Fax: 0870 889 7459

Email: first.contact@barnet.gov.uk

You can also report incidents online using the Fixmystreet page
http://barnet.fixmystreet.com/

So all well and good? Well not really. Just suppose that like me you have a couple of dogs and like me you walk them at 6am in the morning on occasion. Just suppose you see an antisocial git dumping rubbish and you want to get something done about it?

Well you've got the council hotline number. So you ring up in the hope that for once, you can catch them red handed and really get on top of the problem. Then you suddenly get a nasty reminder that this isn't Barnet, it's Capitaville. You see the council has outsourced all its services to Capita. They control the phone lines. When Capita took over, the hard right local Tories who promoted the scheme said that one reason for outsourcing the service was so that flexibility could be introduced into the service and it could be brought into the 21st century.

So what happens if you ring the hotline? Well you get a recorded message saying that Barnet Council is closed and if you need to speak to them, you must call between 9am and 5.15pm Monday to Thursday or 9am and 5pm on Friday. So if you see a flytipper on a Friday at 5pm, then you can't ring up to report it for three days.

Over the last year, I've noticed a huge increase oin flytipping in Barnet. I regularly walk around many of the open spaces and I've seen rubbish dumped in Cressingham Park, Arrendene, Mill Hill Park and Sunny Hill Park in the last month. The sad truth is that Barnet Council do not take flytipping seriously. If they did all of the openspaces and other flytipping hotspots would have signs giving a 24 hour number to sort the issue out. The Council should work with police to get tough with the idiots who cause this problem and have a zero tolerance policy to the issue.

Recently there was a problem of dumping in the carpark at Mill Hill Park. The council could have made a major impact on the problem by setting up CCTV surveillance of the site and then publicly prosecutting the perpetrators.

We have a council election in May. At present the candidates are asking for your vote. My local Conservative Councillors have not said a dickybird about flytipping over the last four years. My local Conservative MP Matthew Offord has said nothing about flytipping. There has been no focus on this most anti social of behaviours. That is why the London Borough of Barnet has become a flytippers paradise. I think the only way to deal with it is zero tolerance. I'd also like to see the council have the power to confiscate the vehicles of flytippers, especially commercial flytippers such as builders etc. There are two reasons people flytip. The first is lazyness and the second is greed. They want you and I to pay for the disposal of their waste. This won't stop until such time as we get councillors who care about the environment and who have the intelligence to actually realise that you need to take action to address the matter. Sadly for all of us, our Barnet Conservative Councillors and their preferred contractors Capita think that a 9-5 council is fit for purpose in the year 2014. Next time you see something dumped in your local street, park or kids play area, just remember that Capita are getting paid the best part of a billion quid of your tax money, courtesy of our local Conservatives, to sort the problem out.