Fly-tipping in Scotland: Why it's time to get tough – Scotsman comment
As The Scotsman today reveals shocking photographs of vast quantities of rubbish dumped illegally beneath a flyover in Glasgow – dubbed the UK capital of fly-tipping – it seems clear that current legislation is not fit for purpose.
No one should think this is simply an issue of keeping the country tidy or making it look nice.
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Hide AdThe annual cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be some £53 million and organised crime is believed to be involved in dumping waste at Glasgow’s Blochairn area and elsewhere.
Furthermore, fly-tippers are circumventing much-needed policies on recycling and damaging the move towards a ‘circular economy’ in which nothing is wasted. Anyone who cares about the environment should be outraged by their actions.
Murdo Fraser MSP is currently working on a private member's bill designed to improve current legislation.
He believes it is time to create a strict liability offence for those whose waste is found to have been fly-tipped, saying it “should not be a defence for someone who creates waste to say that they paid a man in a white van £50 to remove it”. Fraser also suggests it could be made a civil, rather than a criminal, offence, an approach that helped to deal with the problem of dog-fouling.
These sound like ideas whose time may have come.
As Fraser pointed out in a recent article for The Scotsman, “if we are all so proud to be Scottish, and truly care about our environment, then we need to bring the scourge of fly-tipping to an end”.