Slough council to hike fly-tipping fines to avoid looking like 'soft touch'

The leader of Slough Borough Council has said fines for fly-tipping are set to increase to stop the local authority looking like a ‘soft touch’.

Council leader Dexter Smith told a cabinet meeting on Monday night the council is currently trailing neighbouring local authorities in how much it fines people who dump waste.

According to its website, Windsor and Maidenhead council currently charges a fixed penalty fee of £1,000 for those caught carrying out a large amount of fly-tipping.

Whereas in Slough a default fixed penalty of £200 is currently charged for fly-tipping, according to council documents from February.

But as part of this year’s budget the authority is now planning to increase the penalty to £1,000, which is a 400 per cent rise.

Documents state the fine will be reduced to £500 if paid within 10 days.

Councillor Smith (Con, Colnbrook with Poyle) told the meeting: “I’m pleased to announce that it is our intention in the next few months to introduce a higher penalty fee for fly-tipping.

“It hasn't gone unnoticed that Slough is not charging the same penalty that neighbouring boroughs are.

“We’re raising it to the same level as neighbouring boroughs, which is a £1,000 penalty.

“We don’t want people to think that Slough is a soft touch on fly-tipping.”

The meeting also heard how the council is planning the introduction of weekly food waste bins on a trial basis.

The move aims to alleviate some of the pressure faced by residents since the introduction of fortnightly bin collections in June last year.

The scheme will start as a trial before being rolled out across the borough over the next year.

The meeting also saw cabinet members discuss a report outlining the council’s performance in the last quarter of the 2023/24 financial year.

The leader said: “I particularly welcome the fact that we’ve got council tax collection rates up and that waiting times for customer service calls are falling.”

He added that calls were being answered by customer service ‘within five minutes or less in most instances’.

“It’s really important that people feel this is a council that is listening to them, that is responding to them,” Cllr Smith said.

He added there seemed to be more reporting of antisocial behaviour but questioned if this is good or bad because in one respect people feel more inclined to report it, but it is bad in another because people are being ‘driven to the point where they have to’.

Cllr Iftakhar Ahmed (Con, Wexham Court) said there were ‘a lot of positive aspects’ to the report, with the authority doing well in certain areas, but there are other areas where more work is still needed.