It’s hard to believe the London Borough of Brent was once covered in even more rubbish than it is now.
Although the gleaming arch of Wembley Stadium is sometimes just a few steps away, its residential streets are a patchwork of filth.
Whether it’s a sea of bottles right by the very sign for the recycling centre, a hollowed-out sofa sagging against a brick wall or a TV just feet from (but not in) the communal dustbin, Brent is covered in, well, crap.
“It’s like a dump,” says Robert Hall, who has lived there all the 60-odd years of his life.
His neighbourhood has become an obstacle course of dumped cars, rubbish, and mattresses. It might sound like he’s exaggerating, but on my 20-minute walk over from Wembley Park Tube, I see a fridge, TV, pet cage and countless bags of rubbish.
“It’s an eyesore. I’m embarrassed to have people visit,” he adds.
And it’s just as well, because it turns out his friends have told him they don’t like coming to see him any more anyway.
An unenviable crown
Brent recently earned the unenviable title of fly-tipping capital of England, after recording 35,000 incidents in a single year.
It’s a stain Brent Council is slowly managing to scrub away, thanks to its zealous squad of enforcement officers tasked with tracking down the culprits.
“It’s important to take pride in what you do,” says Anca Pricop, enforcement patrol supervisor at Brent Council.
“It might not seem a very nice job, but it is satisfying when you catch people.”
Following the paper trail
“We’re little detectives,” she says, having donned two layers of gloves and attacked a pile of black bin bags with gusto.
All make-up, high ponytail and painted silver nails, she brings remarkable glamour to a decidedly grimy job.
Elbows-deep in someone else’s filth, she starts to piece together 1sq cm of torn-up pieces of paper.
“You can clearly see there was a delivery label inside.”
But to her dismay, no smoking gun this time.
The household went to “a lot of trouble just to rip [the label] and for us not to be able to find [the address]”.
Her luck shifts a few streets away, where a mound of household waste is spilling out of a phone box.
Anca combs through the papers inside. Bingo: a box of medicine with a prescription label still intact.
“We have a name,” she says.
Earlier that week her team seized a van they’d caught fly-tipping by tracing the rubbish back to the vehicle.
She says many people don’t realise the onus is on them to check whether the people offering to take away their waste for a good fee actually have a licence to do so.
“More often than not it will get dumped – on the same street sometimes.”
If caught by Anca, the households will get slapped with a fine.
A national ‘epidemic’
Thanks to the inspections like this, plus new “community skips”, Brent Council says it’s getting a grip on fly-tipping, inching its way down the league table.
But nationally, the figures have barely budged from around the one million incidents a year mark.
New statistics for 2024-2025, due later on Wednesday, are predicted to show that the tide of rubbish is nowhere near receding.
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The figures are also thought to be only the tip of the iceberg, as they exclude cases on private land like farms and National Trust estates. The data also shows how few cases result in fines or prosecutions.
Campaigners at Clean Up Britain accuse local and central governments of failing to enforce the law, or to show that fly-tippers will be caught. It wants stronger enforcement and maximum fines of £20,000.
The government says it is “determined to stop” criminals and is “giving authorities the tools they need to fight back”.
A spokesperson told Sky News “councils have the power to crush their vans – leaving waste criminals with nowhere left to hide”.
Fast-forward a few days from Brent, and we are filming at a recycling facility in Wokingham, where the van seized by Brent Council will be crushed.
That’s the image the councils and government want you to see: perpetrators caught and published.
But for now, for most cases, that is far from the truth.
