Fly Tips and Bulk Waste. A Nerd’s Guide

You’ve got to be something of a statistics nerd to spend hours trawling through different websites of local and national government. Happily, we happen to have a couple of such nerds who are willing to spend hours unearthing long since forgotten information. 

After looking at the astronomical costs of the new bulky waste disposal scheme, we thought that we’d take a look at the figures for bulk waste and fly tips over the last decade, just to see if there are any patterns.

Here’s what we found.

Fly Tipping

Nearly a decade ago, fly tipping was clearly an issue. In the year 2013-14 there was a massive spike. Our enquiries suggested that this was because it was then that Newham introduced new electronic recordings into the vehicle cabs. This made the records far more accurate and for the first time, they knew how many fly tips were actually being collected.

Two years later and the figures had halved.

At this time, it seems the borough employed their enforcement officers in chasing up fly tippers and nipping the problem in the bud by visiting households which had old fridges and furniture in the front garden, (which would in time migrate onto the street),  with a view to having it collected. The proactive efforts of the enforcement teams appear to have had a major impact.

Thereafter, the decline from 2015-2019 was steady and continuous. For some reason, in 2019-20 the fly tipping figures have doubled. This appears to coincide with the introduction of the new policy. It suggests that the Mayor has lost all control of the operations management.

Are there any plans to wrest back control? If the mayor or Cllr Asser will send us the details, we will give them their due prominence.

Bulky Waste

Open Newham has seen papers relating to the pilot scheme which introduced the first charges for collection of bulk waste. This was run between April and December 2016. We assume that those responsible for implementing the scheme looked at the same data.

The first and most startling is that the number of requests were cut by three quarters, from 47,548 to 11, 786. The number of items per collection jumped from 2.1 to 4.1. It seemed that residents using the service were content to group items together when they wanted them to be collected. A modest charge had initiated a significant change in behaviour.

There were three major benefits to the council and indirectly to the residents of Newham.

• The Green Dividend. Cutting three quarters of the road journeys meant a reduction in fuel used, pollution, maintenance and replacement parts on the vehicles.

• The reduction in ‘calls’ meant annual savings of £230,000 equating to 2.5 collection crews and equipment.

• The charge meant that Newham received an annual sum of £300,000 in collection fees.

This small change meant that there was a cash benefit to the council in the first year of over half a million pounds.

Now, if you were having to make cuts of nearly £50m, does this sound like an idea that might help?