Litter Enforcement

Litter – it’s your money you’re throwing away!

As part of our commitment to ensuring a healthy, safe and pleasant environment, our new Environmental Enforcement team will be on patrol in Ashford and Tenterden on an ad-hoc basis, undertaking litter enforcement as part of their remit.

Littering, fly-tipping, fly-posting, graffiti and abandoned cars are not only highly antisocial but also illegal. Litter can be as small as a sweet wrapper, as large as a bag of rubbish, or it can mean lots of items scattered around.

Around £885 million is spent by local authorities in England every year on street cleaning and litter clearance. This means that local tax payers are picking up the bill for other people’s negligence.

You can find out more about the levels of littering across the country on the Keep Britain Tidy website.

What happens if you litter?

The offence of “Leaving Litter” (Section 87 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990) and the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005, says that if a person drops, throws, deposits or leaves anything so as to cause defacement in a public place, they could be committing a littering offence.

In Ashford borough, people caught littering can receive a £500 fixed penalty notice.

Find out more information about our Environmental Enforcement Team.

We have a legal duty (so far as is practicable) to clear litter and refuse from public places that we are responsible for such as streets, parks, playgrounds and pedestrian areas. If a piece of private land is littered, the owner must accept responsibility for clearing the litter. But we encourage everyone to help by not dropping litter in the first place, and to report incidents of fly-tipping.

Report a litter or street cleansing issue online.