Category: Ealing envirocrime

Back in August this fly tip was left round the corner from where I live. At the time the matter was dealt with very efficiently by the council, see previous posting. I went through the stuff and found a credit card bill with an address and our local envirocrime officer took a statement from me.

I was very pleased to see this photo yesterday. It shows Northfield envirocrime officer Ricky Wright and David Stokes, one of the area managers and Ricky’s boss, sitting on the remains of the truck that left the fly tip. The two men concerned have also been arrested, interviewed and charged. I look forward to reporting on their sentences soon.

This morning I was woken with a start at about 6.30am by a terrific crashing sound. My first thought was that someone’s house had fallen down. My second thought was an early morning delivery to a nearby house where they are building an extension. My third thought was fly tippers.

I was out of the house in my pyjamas some 10 seconds later but the truck had already disappeared from view leaving a complete load which partially blocked the road. I needed to rent a new truck so I got a tipper truck from Rentco. Then I e-mailed our envirocrime officer at 7:28am, he called me at 8am and was onsite at 8.30am with the area manager, David Stokes. We found a credit card bill from an address in Wandsworth amongst the rubbish so hopefully we will be able to pursue the flytippers. Photographs were taken and another truck arrived at 9.30 ish to remove the rubbish. By 9:50am it was gone except for the fridge that needs to be collected by a different vehicle.

Well done all. Hope we can nail someone for this.

Our envirocrime team are actively after these people. They currently have another fly tipper’s vehicle impounded for instance. If you hear an early morning crash stick your head out of the window and get their registration!

On a slightly lighter note the Today programme this morning also raised the Keep Britain Tidy campaign against the Post Office. In Ealing we are working really hard to clean up our streets. One of the worst sources of litter is our postmen and women who think they are doing us a favour by throwing their red elastic bands all over the pavement. Last Wednesday morning I did an hour of leaflet delivering between Northcroft and Midhurst Roads. I picked up 26 red bands in that time. The Post Office really need to sort themselves out on this issue. I have written to their chief exec in the past on this but he referred me to their local branch as if it was an isolated problem. Yeah, right.

The Keep Britain Tidy is calling on people to send red rubber bands they find on England’s streets (to arrive by 30th April) to: The Press Office, Keep Britain Tidy, Elizabeth House, The Pier, Wigan, WN3 4EX. I have just put my 26 bands in the post. Please add yours to Keep Britain Tidy’s haul.

Over the last couple of days I have noticed 50 or so green and white posters appearing on lamposts between here and Hammersmith. They are promoting a club night at Bar 38 in Hammersmith this Friday. I had hoped that this had stopped after the pub chain’s company secretary, Andrew Green, wrote to say that he had put an end to this, see previous posting.

Previously these posters had named Bar 38. Now they only mention a website – at least a MySpace page. They have been quiet since early May when Green wrote to me. They seem to think it is OK to start up again messing up west London now 4 months has passed.

This picture was taken in Creighton Road yesterday by our excellent Envirocrime Prevention Area Manager, David Stokes, after I had complained to him about the mess. Notice that the street is otherwise clean.

He has had to chase up the council’s contractors to clean up after themselves – it is great that they have trimmed all of the suckers growing out of the side of the street trees. It is not so great that they have failed to clean up after themselves.

Like my Mum says: “You do one job and make half a dozen others”.

This afternoon I saw two students fly-posting in broad daylight on South Ealing Road, just south of the Tube station. They were pretty green. Maybe they aren’t big enough to go at night on their own yet. I asked them to go and do it somewhere else. Being smart arses they reckoned that using parcel tape to stick them up was not flyposting. I ripped two down and asked them to move along. They carried on and I called our ever-ready envirocrime prevention officer, Ricky Wright. He was in Northfield Avenue with two of the Walpole Safer Neighbourhood Team.

Meanwhile I followed our two daytime fly-posters up South Ealing Road ripping down another six of their posters as I went. Outside TVU I engaged them in conversation to keep them there whilst Ricky & co caught up. The two students, Simon Byrne and John Cooper, both go to some college in Lambeth. They were perfectly earnest and pleasant but did not seem to mind making a mess of our neighbourhood.

The police took their posters and tape off them and verified their identities. Ricky will be writing to give them Fixed Penalty Notices of £80.00 under Section 43 Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 for flyposting.

Bizarely you can buy tickets for the SWP’s “Festival of Resistance” online but they still want to use fly-posting to promote their event. The cynical lefties that sent these idiots out had printed the words “Not to be flyposted” at the bottom of the posters to give themselves plausible deniability. I hope the SWP pay their fines for them. People like Tony Benn, Billy Bragg, Mark Thomas and Tom Stoppard obviously don’t care if the event they are attending uses naive young people to mess up the streets. These are the same idiots that shout into loudhailers in the West End and around Parliament to make their tiny number of supporters seem bigger than they really are.

On 12th April (see previous posting) I had a go at Alchemy Partners for messing up our neighbourhood. After a couple of e-mails to the boss I have got a response from the company secretary of their pub group. Hopefully Bar 38 won’t be messing up Ealing, Hounslow and Hammersmith & Fulham any more.

Dear Mr Taylor

Your emails addressed to Jon Moulton at Alchemy Partners have been passed to this office.

After an incident in February, the promoter responsible for the fly-posters was reprimanded. As a result of the recent incident his services have been terminated.

Staff at Bar 38, operational management and senior head office staff are fully aware that this kind of activity is not acceptable.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Green
Company Secretary
TCG Acquisitions Ltd

Today the Telegraph has gone big on rubbish with a front page headline, a comment piece from Charles Glover and the whole of page 4 devoted to two-weekly collections and other bin stuff. They point out that Gordon Brown’s landfill tax went up from £21 to £24 this month and that it will go up £8 per tonne every year for the next three years. This might be defensible as a green measure but the rate of change is likely to have very damaging consequences for local authorities. It is yet another way that Gordon Brown is burdening local council tax payers to keep cash at the centre to fund his own priorities.

You can see from the graph what damage this is going to do to local government finance. On a slightly geeky note I do wish journalists would learn the difference between a metric Tonne and an Imperial ton. I guess they all do English and skimp on their maths and physics.

Ealing gets a small piece of its own. The slightly dubious headline is “Cameras ‘could spy on your waste'”. I guess “Cameras ‘could spy on your waste but will in fact be used to catch people making a mess of the place'” doesn’t have the same ring. The actual article is very accurate and ends with:

Ealing has decided not to move to fortnightly collections after consulting residents.