The council’s Street Waste Action Team (SWAT) spent several weeks in the ward during April and May, focusing on public education and enforcement against fly-tipping.
They achieved significant improvements in hotspots like Inverness Terrace and the communal bins in Cleveland Square, where they cut fly tipping by nearly 60%, and issued 124 fines and warning notices.
All well and good, but SWAT found our ward challenging and realise they can only sustain that improvement by making frequent repeat visits. The Council supports this change, which we councillors welcome. With so many transient visitors and short-term lettings, you need to keep teaching new people the rules. Otherwise they just copy those who dump their old fridge, along with the new fridge’s packaging, by a tree on Inverness Terrace and watch Veolia scoop it up soon after.
The SWAT team are experts, having won the 2019 national Keep Britain Tidy award for best waste performance. But we need more and better notices and ‘nudge’ techniques to reach the increased numbers of short-term renters and their landlords in our area. The council has commissioned a 6-month study by the Behaviour Change team at Ogilvy Consulting to help us tackle this issue. Meanwhile, in response to your complaints about continued dumping and antisocial behaviour including drug use in the middle section of Inverness Terrace, we are pressing for a co-ordinated clean-up there, involving SWAT, local inspectors and police.
Thanks to strong photographic evidence provided by a concerned neighbour, enforcement action is now underway against builders who have been illegally dumping their waste on Queensborough Terrace. They now face court action, and a heavy fine.
