RUBBISH CHARGE

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Newsagent Ted Patel, owner of Smoker's Paradise in Upminster, Essex, has been fined £50 for dumping a tiny piece of paper in a street bin. A council enforcement officer barged into his store waving the statement that comes with his morning papers. The officer said he found the A5 piece of paper after rooting through a public bin outside Upminster Station. Mr Patel has to pay £50 within 10 days or the charge increases to £75. He also faces six months in prison and a £2,500 fine if he does not pay.

Mr Patel said, "The officer accused me of dumping personal rubbish in the bin, but I didn't even know anything about it. It was a bit of paper with Smokers Paradise and the address printed on it so the drivers know where the papers are going. Maybe the driver dropped it when he was making the delivery, but at least it was in the bin. It's better than dropping it on the floor! If the council can employ snoops to go through the bins at 7.50am when there's litter lying all over the streets then it's an absolute liberty." (Source: Mail on Sunday, Mar/07)

When recent storms blew mounds of sand from the nearby seafront into Arthur Bulmer's garden, he decided to clean it up and shovel it back on to the beach. But he's had to abandon his plan after the local council warned the 79-year-old that it was illegal and threatened him with six months in jail. They said dumping the sand back on the beach amounted to fly-tipping and the pensioner could be fined up to £50,000 or even have his wheelbarrow confiscated.

Fylde Borough Council, have been slowly clearing it up, but say they only have a legal duty to remove sand when it lands on public highways, where it is legally deemed litter. This means council taxpayers, like Mr Bulmer, are being forced to pay to clean up their gardens themselves. A spokesman for Fylde Borough Council said the coastline around Britain was owned by the Queen's estate.

Dumping "anything" on to the beach from a private garden constituted fly-tipping and was a contravention of the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act. Around seven tonnes of sand blew into Mr Bulmer's garden and he has had to pay a private firm £500 to remove it. He said, "I can't understand the council's logic. They say I can't return the sand from where it came from because it is contaminated once it has left the beach, but when the council scoop it off the roads they put it back, contaminated or not." (Source: Mail on Sunday, Mar/07)

Electronic spy 'bugs' have been secretly planted in hundreds of thousands of household wheelie bins. The gadgets transmit information about the contents of the bins to a central database which then keeps records on the waste disposal habits of each individual address.

Already some 500,000 bins in council districts across England have been fitted with the bugs, with nearly all areas expected to follow suit within the next couple of years. Until now, the majority of bins have been altered without the knowledge of their owners.

The official reason for the bugs is to 'improve efficiency' and settle disputes between neighbours over who owns the wheelie bins. Experts however, say the technology is actually intended to enable councils to impose fines on householders who exceed limits on the amount of non-recyclable waste they put out.

New powers for councils to do this are expected to be introduced by the Government shortly. With the bugging technology, the electronic chips are carefully hidden under the moulded front 'lip' of wheelie bins used by householders for non-recyclable waste.

As the bin is raised by the mechanical hoister at the back of the truck, the chip passes across an antenna fitted to the lifting mechanism. That enables the antenna to 'read' a serial number assigned to each property in the street. A computer inside the truck weighs the bin as it is raised, subtracts the weight of the bin itself and records the weight of the contents on an electronic data card.

When the truck returns to the depot, all the information collected on the round is transmitted to a hand-held device and downloaded on to the council's centralised computer. Each household can be billed for the amount of waste collected, even though they have already paid for the services through their council tax.

Although the chip itself is worth only about £2, fitting the equipment to a dustcart costs around £15,000. Council bosses say the monitoring system will improve recycling rates by allowing them to identify areas which are not doing enough. But critics believe the ultimate aim is to charge 'offenders' according to how much unrecyclable rubbish they leave outside for collection.

The Local Government Association's environment chief, Paul Bettison, said, "Removing one of these devices would not break any law as far as I know. But if in the future a local authority decided to charge for taking away rubbish, it would be within its rights to say to that person, if you don't want to pay, we don't want to provide you with a service." (Source: Mail on Sunday, Aug/06)

A huge revolt against wheelie-bin spy bugs is sweeping Britain, with thousands of defiant households removing the electronic devices and either dumping them or posting them back to their local town hall. The protesters are ignoring threats of prosecution for criminal damage in their anger at having their rubbish secretly monitored by council chiefs.

One of the biggest shows of defiance has been in Bournemouth, where councillors estimate that 25,000 bugs have been unscrewed. Bournemouth Council is considering replacing all the 'vandalised' bins at a cost of up to £600,000.

Kennet Council leader Chris Humphries said, "These bins belong to the council. They don't belong to the people who hold them. They are interfering with a bin that belongs to somebody else." A council spokesman added, "Residents are not authorised to remove these numeric chips. The question as to whether the chips' removal constitutes criminal damage is a detailed legal issue."

A council spokesman believes ''residents are not authorised to remove these numeric chips". I doubt if it comes to court that installing bugs on any citizen's activities without a court order is legal. Local authorities seem to overlook the fact that they are there, supposedly, for the benefit of the public who not only elect them to power but finance them through taxes.

They are our servants not our masters. As far as the bins being "council property" is concerned, that is debatable as it could be argued that it is the householder who actually owns the bin having paid for it via council tax. (Source: Mail on Sunday, Sep/06)