Fly-tipping incidents (FOI ref: 1926A/24)
Request
1) How many fly-tipping incidents were reported to your force in the following financial years: 2023/24, 2022/23, and 2021/22.
2) How many of these fly-tipping incidents resulted in an officer attending the scene in the following financial years: 2023/24, 2022/23, and 2021/22.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Fly tipping is not a specific criminal offence – it is covered by environmental legislation.
Therefore, the only way to retrieve any data is by a key word search.
When a member of the public phones the Police, it is initially recorded as:
ROC (record of contact): Where information has been received and Police need no further involvement or action. For example: There will be a road closed on XXXX. Police do not attend a ROC.
Incident: An incident is created where Police involvement is required. Incident: An incident is created where Police involvement is required. If a crime is identified from that incident then a crime is created for the relevant offence. Not all incidents have a crime created.
Please note that the usual way these incidents are dealt with is by the following:
Members of the public are advised that fly tipping is enforced by the Environment Agency and the Local Authority. Please find below a link where you can contact the relevant authorities that you are interested in.
Report fly-tipping or illegal waste dumping – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
We do however, attend some incidents reported that are happening at the time. For example, a member of the public reports a lorry in a lane tipping waste.
We have done a key word search of the MO notes (modus operandi).
Keyword searches are notoriously unreliable, the reasons why searches using this method are not reliable include (but are not limited to) the following: –
- a) Searches rely on the keywords being spelt correctly with no grammatical errors
- b) Searches rely on the keywords actually being mentioned in the summary description of the record – if they are mentioned anywhere else within the record but not in the summary, then they will not feature in any results.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.