Tory Wandsworth: the fly-tip capital of London

Figures just released by the Department for the Environment (DEFRA) have revealed that Wandsworth is the most fly-tipped borough in London.

There were - wait for it - a staggering 158,076 incidents of fly-tipping the council had reported to it: and those are just the cases the council picked up! Astonishingly, Wandsworth accounts for 1 in every 4 fly-tips in the entire capital. The council spent almost £4 million of your money on the problem, and yet only managed a measly 18 prosecutions last year.

This is an issue close to my heart because for eight years I was Labour's Environment spokesman locally and spent a lot of my time forcing the council to clean up grot-spots all over the borough but especially in Roehampton (like the one pictured in Hersham Close above).

So it's little surprise to me that these new figures have found Wandsworth lagging badly, because whatever this council does well, keeping our streets clean isn't it. Over the past three years complaints about street cleaning have soared. We've seen how popular my campaign to improve the shameful state of Putney High Street has been. We've had scandal after scandal with the refuse contract.

Why is Wandsworth is so much dirtier than other boroughs? Why are fly-tippers more prepared to treat our area as a dumping ground for their rubbish? How can we do better? One of the ideas I've urged the council to adopt is to provide borough residents with a free collection of larger/heavier items of waste from their home - which in one stroke removes such incentive as there is to flytip. That's a service residents of Hammersmith & Fulham get - and their council spends barely 20% of Wandsworth on flytipping as a result because it's much less of a problem.

My experience of dealing day-in, day-out with this issue for almost a decade is that this council just isn't getting to grips with it. There doesn't seem to be the leadership to tackle it. Because improving the local environment has been my political priority for years and years, you can rest assured that as MP I'll provide the leadership so evidently lacking here.

Here are the DEFRA council-by-council figures and here's the BBC coverage of the story