Wiltshire Council has been successfully awarded £46,391 of grant funding from the Government’s Fly-Tipping Intervention Grant fund to help combat fly-tipping in the county.
The council’s funding submission was for overt CCTV towers that will be placed in fly-tipping hotspots around the county. The towers will be used in tandem with the council’s existing network of overt and covert CCTV cameras that are regularly catching fly-tippers in the act throughout Wiltshire, as part of the council’s award-winning We’re Targeting Fly-tippers (WTF) campaign. WTF was launched following the council’s extra investment of £150,000 each year for three years to tackle fly-tipping and environmental crime in the county. The funding has seen the council employ more officers and invest in more equipment such as these overt and covert cameras to reduce fly-tipping and increase prosecutions for environmental crime.
The extra funding will also be spent on a forthcoming campaign on household duty of care, to educate people to dispose of their waste lawfully. The duty of care campaign aims to advise all residents to not hand their waste to anyone without checking they have a valid waste carriers’ licence, note their vehicle details and get a receipt or waste transfer note. If they fail to do these checks and their waste becomes fly tipped, they may be fined if their waste is dumped by someone else.
Cllr Nick Holder, Cabinet Member for Highways, Street Scene, and Flooding, said: We’re serious about tackling fly-tipping here in Wiltshire as proven by our award winning communication campaign and our successful bids for external funding.
This extra funding for CCTV towers will help us to continue our mission to prosecute more offenders and educate people about how to dispose of their rubbish safely and legally.
Our zero-tolerance approach is part of our Business Plan commitment to tackle fly-tipping in our beautiful county, and this is evident in the number of fixed penalty notices we’ve issued and the successful fly-tipping prosecutions we’ve already had.
If anyone spots fly-tipping in the county, I’d urge them to report it to us using MyWilts and our officers will investigate and take action.
The council is also cracking down on layby littering by investing in three mobile CCTV cameras to install at litter hotspots throughout the county, as part of its Don’t Mess with Wiltshire campaign, which aims to reduce littering in the county and bring about behaviour change. This campaign is part of a £510,000 extra investment the council has allocated to fund litter enforcement. This is an addition to more than £1.5m that the council currently spends on cleaning up litter across the county each year.
