A guide to fining the Council for litter

The Times carries a story this morning on the many thousands who are now being chased and fined by local government bin police. Given the poor state of many of our streets, parks, amenity green areas, beaches and other public open spaces you may find this ironic. However, and I mean this quite seriously, if you are aggrieved by such litter and do nothing about it, it is YOUR FAULT.

Section 91 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 allows any person aggrieved by such litter or refuse to apply directly to the local magistrates' court for an order against the council. If the council fails to comply with the order, it may be convicted and fined.

Now please don't take this as an invitation to lay premature, frivolous or vexatious cases before our already overburdened magistrates; if you follow the steps below, I think there will be few cases where this will be necessary. Readers bored already may click on something else now ...

1. Catch your hare, as Mrs Beaton said. You really must be aggrieved by the want of cleanliness of an area of public space, and it should be a regular and persistent want of cleanliness. The footpath to your daily station, the local park, an eyesore scrappy piece of amenity greenspace you drive through every day, a beach or foreshore where you walk the dog, or the road outside your home.

2. Determine ownership. In most cases this will be clear, but shorelines above the high water line and railway land may prove difficult - read the Act under the heading 'relevant land'.

3. Look carefully at the standards given in the government's Statutory Guidance - the area must look like 'C' or 'D' to be actionable. Take photographs, and use the date and time imprint if you have one - you may need to refer the photographs in your witness statement. The council or landholder has a period of grace in which to put it right, and this varies. For the street outside your house, or the path to the station this may be one day; for a town centre street, half a day and for an isolated foreshore 14 days.

4. Email the council or landholder. For councils, email addresses are usually given on their websites, but ensure you also address to the chief executive. Their email addresses are standard and I haven't come across a council yet where chief.executive@yourcouncil.gov.uk doesn't reach them. Write in something like the following terms (giving your name and postal address). Also send a hard-copy of the notice at the same time to the chief executive.

Dear Sir,

Notice under s.91 Environmental Protection Act 1990

The Council's land ( describe location as fully as possible - plan, OS map reference may all be useful) is heavily littered / unclean / disfigured with refuse or waste and is detrimental to the amenity of the area to the extent that I am aggrieved by the want of cleanliness.

I attach photographs taken at (time) and (time) that show no improvement or efforts to clean or remediate the want of cleanliness, and I believe that this land should be cleaned to the standards and within the timescales for land of category (n) within the Statutory Guidance to s.89 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.

I therefore give (five days or more) notice under s.91 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 that unless the Council remediates this nuisance by that time, that you will be liable to legal action that may lead to a conviction and fine.

5. If, in the extraordinary event that the council fails to comply with the notice, you will need more photographs and will need to make out a Witness Statement that details all of the above including the photographs ("At about 4pm on the 1st of May, I again visited the location and found it to be heavily littered. I took photographs, labelled Pic6 to Pic10,..."

6. You will then need to contact the clerk to the magistrates and tell them that you wish to lay an information in respect of an offence committed by the council. The court will then summons the chief executive to answer the charge.

If councils are genuinely committed to securing a litter free environment, and not just committed to bullying their citizens, I am sure they will welcome the above guidance with open arms to help them to better manage their estate ...