More than 40 tonnes of fly-tipping cleared in two months from just one Doncaster neighbourhood

A report on fly-tipping presented to the council’s cabinet reveals street cleaning teams removed the vast amount of fly-tipping in Hexthorpe. In May 2021, 15 tonnes were cleared and another 28 tonnes were collected in June.

Across the borough, bosses said over 1,600 tonnes of fly-tipping were cleared – the equivalent weight of 80 school buses.

As part of Mayor Jones’s priorities moving forward, DMBC bosses now have over £460,000 in extra funding to tackle fly-tipping across the borough. This is being spent on extra staff, vehicles and enforcement equipment such as covert CCTV.

Waste bosses at the council have said they are ‘closing more cases than receiving’ but the council still has hundreds of cases in their backlog to deal with.

Reports show that during April and June 2021 (Quarter 1), 2,186 cases were opened but 2,993 were cleared up.

The log of open jobs reduced from 1278 at the start of April to 471 at the end of June – a 69 per cent reduction.

Bosses have also said that Street Scene have been ‘working closely’ with colleagues in digital services to improve back-office systems related to fly-tipping and litter.

The council website has been updated which aims to capture information needed to appropriately respond to incidents better.

It’s hoped the upgrades will bring about better ‘service intelligence’ and ‘promote enhanced operational and strategic decision making’.

Dan Swaine, the council’s director of economy and environment said: “Within the industry there is national recognition that jobs can differ dramatically in size and complexity, in some cases could take several days to clear and sometimes require specialist equipment.

“Any jobs with asbestos have to be passed to a specialist contractor leading to delays in response time.

“Given this challenging position and the amount of fly-tipping we have experienced locally we strategically determined within Quarter 1 (April to June) to prioritise the clearance of back-logged as opposed to most recent cases.

“This is principally because they represent longer-standing resident issues, but also because if we don’t clear these long standing issues we will not be able to start managing our performance from a ‘clean slate’ – which has been identified as an improvement process necessity.”

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