Bolton Council to raise fly tipping and littering fines

This comes after long running complaints about rubbish and fly tips left strewn across many of the borough’s streets over recent months and years.

Bolton Council has now authorised plans to raise fines by hundreds of pounds in some cases.

Cabinet member for regulatory services Cllr Sue Haworth said: “Fines increases are an important tool in the box to get Bolton’s way of dealing with excess litter and fly tipping back to the Labour Council days when the council was winning plaudits in the country for it’s work.

“It’s hard to do this as the government continues to strip out our finance in local government.

Fly tipping on Back Dijon St North, Deane in January (Image: Newsquest)

“We want our fixed penalty notices council higher fines to work here, as opposed to spending more on preparing cases for court where fines there are not paid to the council.”  

This comes after the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs figures showed in January that Bolton had been blighted by a record number of fly tipping incidents last year.

These figures showed that there were 5,883 fly-tipping incidents in Bolton in the year to March 2023 a sharp rise from 1,184 in 2021-22 and the highest figure since records began in 2012-13.

That same month people living in the Deane area said they had been subjected to repeated fly tipping incidents in January this year.

This was just a month after three days of action by the council’s authority's cleaning team and enforcement officers took place from Wednesday December 6 to Friday December 8.

The waste included mattresses, sofas and fencing found dumped around Dijon Street, Daisy Street and Croston Street. 

This week proposals were put before the council to increase the steepest fines for littering from £150 to £300 and from £400 to £600 for fly tipping.

The fines for those who fail their duty of care for household waste will also rise from £400 to £600.

The council will also raise the maximum rate for discounted fines from £150 to £175 for littering, £300 to £450 for fly tipping and £300 to £450 for waste duty of care.

Discounts are offered in some cases when people pay their fines early.

These are all fines given out by the council, but the changes will not affect how much people can be fined when they are sent to court.

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In court, the maximum littering fine is £2,500 while the fly­ tipping maximum fine is unlimited with the possibility of the culprits being sent to prison.

Cllr Haworth said: “This council Labour administration is proud of the motivated and energetic teams we have working every day on hot spot areas that need litter or fly tipping enforcement and behaviour change.

“We provide on street education for residents in some areas because that’s how we get the best return for every pound we spend on fixing these problems in streets and neighbourhoods in the borough.”    

The new measures are set to be reviewed in another six months time.