A councillor has expressed concerns over the staffing of the team employed to prosecute fly tippers in the area.
Coun Paul Barnes told a recent meeting of South Holland District Council that he’d been looking at the activiities after the councillor for Fleet raised an incident of fly-tipping in July which had yet to be cleaned-up.
“Nothing has been done about it, even with names and addresses provided and with a statement,” the leader of the opposition at the authority told the Full Council.
Since 2023, SHDC has outsourced its dealings of fly-tipping to a private company known as Kingdom.
“I’ve also learned Kingdom’s training officer has resigned,” Coun Barnes continued. “How many Kingdom officers do we currently have that are trained to knock on doors and investigate fly-tipping.
“I’m concerned there’s going to be an increase in fly-tipping,” he continued saying he wouldn’t ‘argue’ with those, including SHDC’s portfolio holder for environmental services, Coun Antony Casson, who claim the new system of booking slots to use Lincolnshire’s Waste Recycling Centre will lead to such incidents.
“At the minute we’re going to struggle to investigate all those reports that come in because at the minute we’ve got no trained officers to do that.
“You need to get somebody permanently moved to South Holland while the others get trained up to that level otherwise we have no chance of keeping on top of it.”
Coun Casson confirmed that currently Kingdom only had one fully trained officer dedicated to South Holland, but that others assigned to its partner councils Boston and East Lindsey had been stepping in to serve in the area.
After apologising to Coun Barnes for officers ‘not getting back quick enough’, he continued.
“At the moment there’s two Kingdom officers and they’re both pretty new,” he said. “I’m led to believe that one of them is in the stage of getting trained so he can take statements.
“I’m not trying to make excuses because we’re in it with all three councils and there’s officers coming from, mainly Boston, into South Holland.”
The booking system for the Waste Recycling Centres is set to go live next month.
Lincolnshire County Council, which oversees the tips, says there is ‘no evidence’ to suggest that the booking system, something previously used during the COVID-19 lockdowns, would leave to an increase in incidents of fly-tipping.
