One in 10 London Households is a Fly-Tipper, New Data Reveals
An average of one in every 10 households is involved in fly-tipping in London, new data has revealed.
Analysis by waste removal marketplace, LoveJunk.com, has found that fly-tipping in the capital is now 300% worse than the rest of the country.
LoveJunk compared the latest ONS household figures for England with fly-tipping data statistics from the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs in 2020.
Of nearly one million reported incidents, more than one in three (or 360,000) occurred in London, with 11 fly tips per 100 homes, compared to a national average of just three.
At a local level the story is more complex, with annual rates of fly-tipping per household varying widely by borough.
The analysis reveals the five London boroughs with the biggest problem to be Brent, Camden, Haringey, Hounslow and Redbridge, which together accounted for more than one third of all fly tipping reported in London in 2020.
At the other end of the scale, Islington topped the list of cleanest boroughs with only two fly tips (1.6 to be precise) per 100 households, followed by Bromley, Barnet, Kingston and Bexley.
LoveJunk also found that there was no clear link between council bulky waste charges and fly tipping – of the five councils with the worst levels of fly tipping, only one charged more than the £30 average collection fee of all London councils.
“You often hear how a particular council has a big fly tipping problem and that dropping their bulky waste collection charges will help solve it. So, we thought we’d crunch the data to see if that was really true”, said LoveJunk.com’s founder, Jason Mohr.
“Adjusting for the number of households (because fly-tipped waste is largely from the home), we found that although London clearly does have a serious fly tipping issue, many boroughs are actually in a much better position than the rest of the country. We also found that despite popular belief, levels of fly tipping do not seem remotely connected to how much a council charges for its bulky waste collection service.
“Rather than urging councils to cut waste collection service fees, maybe it would be more constructive to focus on identifying what boroughs like Islington, Bromley and Barnet are doing differently, so their best practices can be applied to neighbouring councils.”
More information
For more images and detail, go to https://www.lovejunk.com/blog/trash-talk/fly-tipping/
For a full breakdown of the statistics, see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zglMHgOQasQ_R_tV2cdMcWVEvhWHCtt-HHMwDF_DlWo/edit?usp=sharing
About LoveJunk.com
LoveJunk.com is an online marketplace for waste removal and reuse. It finds your cheapest available licensed waste collector or reuse organisation. More details at https://www.lovejunk.com/
Media contact
Jason Mohr
Published on PRFIRE