Many residents have “given up” reporting incidents of fly-tipping to a Welsh local authority due to lack of action on the issue, campaigners have said.
It comes as new figures show that Bridgend Council has not prosecuted anyone for fly-tipping for almost 10 years, despite receiving over 1,500 reports a year of rubbish being dumped.
“We’ve tried over the years to push them… but they’re not prepared to take action,” said Huw Griffiths of Coity Wallia Commoners’ Association.
Bridgend Council said it had shifted its focus towards prevention and education in recent years, given “the resources that remain available to us”.
In 2023-24, Bridgend Council recorded 1,510 incidents of fly-tipping, a slight reduction on the 1,600 reported in the previous year.
But despite those occurrences, it was now almost a decade since the council prosecuted anyone.
Mr Griffiths, who is retired but previously worked for the Environment Agency, said the inaction of Bridgend Council “doesn’t surprise” him.
“We’ve tried over the years to push them into action over fly-tipping,” he said.
“But they told us they were not prepared to take action unless it’s on council-owned property.
“The [fly-tipping] figures are probably not accurate anyway, because people locally have given up on reporting it – they’ve given up contacting the council because they haven’t been addressing it.”
In 2020 Coity Wallia Commoners’ Association won a private prosecution over fly-tipping on nearby farmland, in what was believed to the first case of its kind in Wales.
But five years on, Mr Griffiths, the group’s secretary, said they had been continually “frustrated” by further incidents which have since gone unpunished.
“We’ve had people fly-tipping bags of rubbish, and I know of cases where sheep have been killed from eating them,” he said.
“We’ve had broken glass on the common, and the farmers getting together to clear it – there were four bin bags full of bottles and things like that.”
While councils are responsible for clearing fly-tipping from public land, they do not have to clear waste from private land.
Since Bridgend Council’s last prosecution for fly-tipping, neighbouring authority Neath Port Talbot had brought forward 139 cases, with the vast majority resulting in fines.
Over the same period, Welsh government data indicates that Cardiff Council made 206 prosecutions, while Rhondda Cynon Taf had a total of 143.
But the picture across Wales is mixed, with many recording only a handful of prosecutions a year – and Anglesey Council having none going back almost two decades.
Bridgend council said it investigated all instances of reported fly-tipping and waste issues. But, by law, it had to “demonstrate that we have attempted to work with residents prior to issuing fixed penalty notices”.
It said that there had been a reduction in the number of fly-tipping and waste incidents in the borough since 2022-23.
The lack of prosecutions, it added, was due to an increased focus on prevention and education for people, on how to recycle and dispose of waste in a safe and responsible manner.
It added: “While this approach is proving to be effective, wherever appropriate the authority will still seek to take action against offenders who refuse to use the waste and recycling system properly.”
