A man has been fined £500 for ‘fly tipping’, when high winds blew his bin lid open and deposited an envelope on the grass. The council was Welwyn Hatfield, which employs the company District Enforcement to issue environmental fines on commission (the company is paid a portion of fines issued).
This is the latest in a string of such ‘fly tipping’ fines (see other cases here and here), where private enforcement companies targeted people for entirely innocuous actions. A Welwyn Hatfield pensioner recently complained online about receiving a similar fly tipping fine, for a fridge that was ‘absolutely not my waste’, after District Enforcement linked the fridge to a carton inside the bin with his name on it.
Obviously the high value of a ‘fly tipping’ fine makes it particularly attractive to private enforcement companies, who are stretching any conceivable definition of a criminal offence in order to maximise fines issued.
The man describes events as follows:
“Welwyn Hatfield council use a company called District Enforcement, and they posted me an FPN for £500 (£350 if paid early) for fly-tipping, saying I had breached section 33 of the Environmental Protection Act. There were few details apart from that the waste was a box found on the grass on my road. I phoned them and asked for what evidence they have and they sent me photos of an envelope. This seems to be about 80 metres from my house and it looks like an Amazon card envelope with my name and address on it. I put in an appeal on their website and have emailed them stating I don’t know how it got there and that it could be wind blew it out of my recycling bin (there were heavy winds the night before the rubbish collection). I also sent them a picture of a fox by my tipped over bin as it had knocked it over previously, and evidence of a couple of Amazon packages that had gone missing before Christmas, one of which was a DVD which could have come in an envelope like that.”

So it could have been a fox that took the envelope, or it could be high winds that blew it out. Either way, the man put his rubbish correctly in his recycling bin, and closed the lid.
When he appealed the FPN, the company send the following reply:
Under section 33, the deposit of controlled waste in an unauthorised manner constitutes an offence, regardless of the intent or circumstances surrounding the deposit. We understand your concerns and note your statement that you were not directly involved in the deposit of this waste. However, it remains your responsibility to ensure the secure disposal of waste associated with your household…. While you have suggested that your waste may have been accessed or removed from your property without your knowledge, it is your duty to take reasonable measures to prevent unauthorised access to your waste. It is also your responsibility to ensure waste is securely in your waste receptacles to avoid the waste blowing out of the bins.
As the man points out, it is not clear what he is supposed to do to prevent the fox or wind accessing his closed rubbish bin, beyond keeping watch the night before bin collection.
These companies are not enforcing the law, or guidance, or any assessment of public harm. Instead – understandably as they have to make a profit – they are stretching the law beyond any reasonable interpretation, to enable the issuing of penalties.
The law on fly tipping, for example, is concerned with the ‘illegal disposal of controlled waste’, for example by waste disposal companies, or domestic waste dumped in an unauthorised location, such as ‘larger domestic items such as sofas or fridges’. A stray envelope from a bin would not meet any reasonable definition of ‘illegal disposal of controlled waste’: he wasn’t disposing of the waste, but putting waste out for collection in the required manner.
Even so, section 33 of the fly tipping legislation – which requires a criminal standard of proof, beyond reasonable doubt – requires that somebody
deposit controlled waste [or extractive waste], or knowingly cause or knowingly permit controlled waste [or extractive waste] to be deposited.
Neither of which applies, since the man neither deposited the envelope on the grass, nor knowingly permitted the wind (or perhaps the fox) to deposit it on the grass.
Rather than fly tipping law, the offences that bear more relation to this man’s situation – waste collection regulations or littering offences – would also exonerate him.
Defra guidance says of waste receptacle penalties:
You cannot issue them for minor problems, such as when householders…forget to close receptacle lids.
(In any case, the man remembered to close his bin lid – it was the fox or the wind that opened it).
If his offence was considered to be littering, then Defra guidance states that penalties should not be issued
If a littering offence is accidental – for example if something falls from someone’s pocket. In order to maintain public trust in the legitimacy of enforcement action against littering, enforcement action should only be taken where there is evidence of an intent to drop and leave litter.
In their drive for pecuniary gain, these companies are removing any element of reasonableness (or founding legal principles such as intent) from the relevant laws. Even ancient civilisations distinguished intentional crimes from acts of nature or chance, for which people could not be held responsible.
Now the legal process is replaced by two-bit employees of the issuing company, whose ‘process’ amounts to slippery maneuvering in order to justify the fine. This is cod law, where references to ‘section 33’ are chucked around to scare someone into paying up, rather than a legal code that is carefully applied.
This is a travesty of the legal process and of public office. Welwyn Hatfield Council should be ashamed of itself, for letting such predatory mercenaries loose on its rate payers. If they had any sense of public service, they would cancel the contract forthwith – as well as cancelling this gentleman’s absurd fine.
Such cases are inevitable so long as councils contract private companies to issue penalties on commission. That is why the Manifesto Club is calling on Defra to ban fining for profit, once and for all.
The previous government was on the verge of banning fining for profit, but it looks as if the current government might have dropped the ball.
This is an issue of utmost public importance. The government should act against these cowboy profiteers, and end the ‘payment per fine’ contracts that sell the public down the river.