Fines for littering set to increase in Canterbury
The council is set to increase fines for environmental crimes across the board, including for littering, graffiti and ensuring the proper disposal of household waste.
Transcript
00:00 Trash talk at Canterbury City Council earlier this week as Cabinet voted to increase fines
00:05 for those not watching out for their waste. Back in July, the UK government gave local
00:09 authorities the right to increase fixed penalty notices for residents being a nuisance with bins
00:14 or turning local amenities into a dump. This means the council is now throwing away the penalties
00:19 for littering, fly-sipping and duty of care for waste they've had since 2018 in favour of tougher
00:25 fines. The Cabinet hopes that this decision won't just help make the streets of Canterbury cleaner,
00:30 it will help the rural communities that they serve as well. We have a huge problem in the
00:34 countryside, you know, sort of people think tend to think the three towns of Canterbury,
00:39 Whitstable and Herne Bay but also we cover a huge rural area and I have a lot of sympathy
00:44 with farmers who turn up to feed their animals and find that their farm gate is blocked
00:51 by a large amount of fly-tipping. This is organised stuff, this is not sort of,
00:58 yeah, you're sort of your household saying oh I want to get rid of a bed I'll go and stick it
01:03 somewhere else because they haven't got the means to do that so somebody has to be carrying that
01:08 and it's those unlicensed carriers that this is really targeted at. The increases in fines means
01:14 that fines for littering will rise to £200 and for fly-tipping it will rise to a whopping £1,000.
01:21 While almost all the councillors welcome the rise of fly-tipping,
01:25 Conservatives are concerned that the punishment for littering is unnecessarily high.
01:30 Littering again is something that we want to we want to stop and littering makes a mess of our
01:37 city and our towns and especially our coastal areas but I do think that there comes a point
01:44 when people stop littering because they're being fined it does start to get a bit punitive
01:51 just to put the fines up because you can put the fines up. But what do the locals think? Well I've
01:56 been out in the bay today speaking to residents asking them whether they agree with the plans
02:01 or whether they think it's just a load of rubbish. I think it's a good thing anything that stops
02:06 people from leaving their rubbish instead of taking it home it's got to be a good thing.
02:10 Funny if people are aware and they might stop doing it I mean fly-tipping is the worst when you see
02:15 sofas or mattresses on the pavement. Well yeah because I mean there is a lot of littering that
02:20 goes on in the area I mean just around the corner there's just dump fridges,
02:24 drawers. It's how they reinforce it that's the difficulty I think.
02:32 How do they actually catch these people? It's all right enforcing a fine but it's catching them
02:40 in the first place. And the people that do the fly-tipping rule they pay the fine in the first
02:43 place. The old fines are set to be binned in January next year coinciding with Caswell
02:49 City Council's new Love Where You Live campaign. But while residents in the bay may look forward
02:54 to cleaner streets, whether households or litterers are unfairly left in the lurch remains to be seen.
03:00 Oliver Leeders of SACS reporting for KMTV.