In
a report today, The Journal reports:
More rubbish is illegally dumped in Haringey's streets than almost anywhere else in London - despite the council spending the most on tackling the problem.
They refer to
"research" carried out by waste disposal firm AnyJunk, but in fact the data on which both AnyJunk's and the Journal's stories are based comes from
DEFRA.
Now whilst I'm very comfortable with criticising Haringey when it's warranted, the data looks odd to me. I think it warrants some scepticisim.
A quick look at DEFRA's website shows that their data is from the
Flycapture database. The website explains:
Due to the variable nature of authorities and the different factors influencing flytipping and enforcement the data cannot be interpreted to provide "best and worst" authorities. An authority reporting a large number of flytips may also be taking a lot of action to address the situation and to properly record incidents.
I'm taking this to mean that the quality of data for any single authority is influenced by the quality of its reporting.
Dig around in the data and your confidence won't be boosted. Consider the following:
1. Is it realistic that Bexley would experience only 1,160 flytipping incidents in a year, whilst Lambeth had 3,762, Haringey 30,988 and Lewisham 48,609?
2. Is it credible that Lewisham would have taken action on only 3% of incidents and Haringey on 21%, whilst 9 boroughs apparently took action on more than 100% of incidents, six of them more than 200% and the apparently most efficient on over 500%?
(See attached document at the foot of this post - my extrapolation of DEFRA's data - original table linked to below)
This strikes me as distinctly dodgy data. And that's a shame because there is obviously an issue with flytipping in Haringey and, I'm sure, elsewhere in London. It's a shame because it probably diguises what perhaps ought to be our focus. The AnyJunk piece reports:
The poor enforcement of fines by many councils only adds to the problem, with the number of actual prosecutions for illegal dumping being extremely low. As a result, more cases of fly-tipping occur and so it continues.
That's what struck me from
DEFRA's table (pdf) - how very little successful enforcement there appears to be. Apparently only Enfield is being pro-active in pursuing fly-tippers.
On the costs side of things the Hornsey Journal tells us that Haringey is "spending the most on tackling the problem". It's not clear to me where that data comes from since I can't find it in either the Anyjunk or DEFRA sources. I do note from my
2007 post on this issue that at the time Haringey were apparently doing rather well. (Although the links in that story no longer work, the dataset it was based on is
still available on the DEFRA site (pdf)) What DEFRA do tell us on costs is that clearing flytiping cost councils £45.8 million in 2009 - 2010. A further £19.1 million was spent on enforcement in the same period.
In terms of judging a council's performance, DEFRA has the following to say:
In 2008-09 National Indicator NI196 (pdf) was introduced. This measures local authority performance on fly-tipping by recording the number of flytipping incidents against the level of enforcement action being carried out.
My understanding of
Haringey's last assessment on the national indicators in December last year shows them getting the top score.
So I'm not really sure where all that leaves me. Mainly none the wiser. And that's a pity. All DEFRA's caveats and
a report they link to on the causes of Fly Tipping (pdf) shows just how complicated the picture is.
[PS: Just going through the tagging I noticed that Alan Stanton has
previously referred to the DEFRA stats as "annual pantomime".]