Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions - Keep Britain Tidy

Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions
3 What Flycapture tells us
In an effort to get a clearer national picture of the fly-tipping problem the
Environment Agency launched the Flycapture database in April 2004. All local
authorities as well as the Environment Agency are required to submit monthly
returns on the number, size, waste and location type of the fly-tips recorded
each month. It is intended that in the future, local authorities will also be
required to report the actions taken against fly-tippers.
Problems with data
This study revealed a number of problems of reliability and validity of the data:
1. Although guidance is provided to local authorities on how to classify fly-tips,
it is clear that local authorities have different ideas of what constitutes a flytip
and what does not. Side-waste is a particular issue, recorded in some
local authorities as fly-tipping, but not in others. This can generate huge
differences in the data. Liverpool, for instance, had to be excluded from
this analysis as its Flycapture returns showed that black-bag fly-tipping
incidents in alley-ways increased suddenly by a factor of more than a
hundred as a result of their inclusion of side-waste in the figures.
2. While most local authorities comply with the requirement to submit
Flycapture returns in terms of reporting the number of incidents that have
taken place each month, not all have been so willing to break down these
returns into the separate Flycapture categories: size, waste and location
type. For some local authorities that do not have the appropriate systems
in place, collating this information requires considerably more effort.
Consequently, some authorities only complete part of the return or dump
all incidents into one field; entering ‘0’s for the others. In addition, there
was some evidence to suggest that a few local authorities simply guess
how their fly-tipping incidents are distributed across categories.
3. Some local authority performance targets are based on Flycapture data.
This creates an incentive to inflate the number of incidents at the base-line
so that performance targets are more easily met, and to include incidents
that other local authorities might reject as fly-tipping.
4. Since local authorities are only required to submit data on fly-tipping
incidents they deal with, not all fly-tips are reported to Flycapture. Those
occurring on private land, for example, which are not the council’s
responsibility, are frequently not entered on the system.
5. Flycapture guidance stipulates that a fly-tip can only be classified into one
category. This makes it hard to know how to record a mixed waste fly-tip
comprising of a fridge, a sofa and several bags of building rubble, for
example. This example could be classed as either ‘white goods’, ‘other
household waste’, or ‘construction and demolition waste’.
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