Harringay online

Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

By heaven, my heart is a flutter today as I discover that Guardian Data has mapped fly tipping incidents from 2012-2013

The good news. Haringey is not as bad as Newham.

The bad news. Haringey is still horribly, painfully high.

Here are the figures taken from the map:

Haringey

Total Incidents: 12398
Incidents per 1000 people: 48.63
Clearance costs: £662369

Number of incidents by equivalent size:

Single black bag: 39
Single item: 1216
Car boot or less: 1401
Small van load: 9053
Transit van load: 689
Tipper lorry load: 0
Significant/multi load: 0

Looking at those figures, my hunch about major tipping on the Ladder i.e. that it's done from cars or vans feels right but there's an awful lot of people sticking a single item in the street in the hope they can propitiate the wrathful Haringey trash gods with their offerings of broken wardrobes, old mattresses or the unwanted rubbish from under their bed stuffed into a bag.

And look at the COST of it. That's costing an old people's lunch club or a children's centre drop in or two, wouldn't you say?

See the full map here

Tags for Forum Posts: fly tipping

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Thanks for drawing attention to this report, interesting to have some figures. 

May I use this opportunity to link to my short YouTube clip on Dovecote Avenue, which runs from Lymington to Barclays on the High Road. For years it had been blighted by dumping and fly tipping, while residents kept complaining to the council. 

I'm not sure the situation has changed much to this day.

A treat for those who appreciate large amounts of rubbish lovingly deposited for maximum inconvenience:

http://youtu.be/xPGJQieerAM

Thank you for sharing this with us.  Words fail me....

It's not immediately apparent where this data comes from. It may be the notorious Flycapture database collected by the Environment Agency. Notorious to me, that is. Although accepted as hard facts by everyone else - including the Guardian, it seems.

Why am I sceptical? Quite simply because the figures are unbelievable. 

I don't mean that parts of Haringey haven't got high levels of littering, dumping and organised fly-tipping. Of course we have. Bel Fegore's video and photos of Dovecote Avenue, Wood Green show part of this problem. So do Liz Ixer's photos over the years. As do my own.

My scepticism about such figures comes from the very wide variation in reports between different London boroughs. And not just the very wealthy suburban areas compared to the poorest; but adjacent boroughs with similar social mix and problems.

This issue came up at the last Environment Scrutiny Panel, where I asked a senior officer if he also thought that boroughs operated different standards for reporting these incidents. He agreed.

Of course, the figures are useful to Haringey if its reporting criteria remain the same. Our Environment Department can track variations over time. As well as particular patterns. (For example if dumping did or didn't rise following the roll-out of the fortnightly general waste collections.)

But some of this comparative data looks pretty shaky to me. For example, would you confidently rely on a database which tells you that Southwark had a total of 25,894 incidents of flytipping etc, while neighbouring Lambeth only 1,454 in the same time period?

___________

Bel Fegore, in 2011 we shared information and photos about Dovecote Avenue in Wood Green. That delightfully named alleyway. Although I'd seen your Flickr photos I was still shocked by the extent of the squalor there. I passed this information on to the three Noel Park councillors, and haven't been back since. Does anyone have up-to-date photos? Surely it can't be as bad?

I have explored the little alleyways on the western side of Wood Green High Road behind the shops. Not much "kerb appeal" there either.

Glimpses of the world in the alleys behind shops sometimes reminds me of an article written by Steve Knight the screenwriter of "Dirty Pretty Things". He said the film came from his fascination with hotels. "How you can walk from the first world to the third world just by walking through a door marked "staff only"

I'm assuming a large part of the removal cost is attributed by weight (disposal costs) and we have a large number of small and transit van loads but purely by the number of incidents, it seems to cost Haringey more than three times that of Camden. Am I oversimplifying this?

One other thought is that these numbers might be quite conservative and the true number considerably higher, as many incidents of fly-tipping might be dealt with by street sweepers and go unreported.

Perhaps once Brussels enforce their new regulations, and we potentially see more bin blight in our street, we will all end up with a skip in our front gardens and those that fly tip won't need to any longer.

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