With piles of rubbish 15ft wide and nearly as high, you could be forgiven for thinking you were standing in the middle of a landfill site.
There’s everything from fridge freezers to plastic Christmas trees. One pile is a mess of commercial waste: mangled metal, loose bricks and rubble. Elsewhere there’s a car seat, gym equipment, hoovers, sofas, a fuse box, countless black bin bags and – surprisingly – three young children kicking a football about.
For this isn’t a landfill site at all. It’s a playing field in the London borough of Croydon, an area suffering from a fly-tipping epidemic. The problem has become so bad that desperate locals have dubbed their own town the ‘Dustbin of London’.
Data obtained by the Daily Mail reveals 55,192 incidents of fly-tipping were reported to Croydon council in the first eight months of this year, making it one of the most fly-tipped boroughs in the country.
The size and scale of the issue is almost unfathomable. And yet fly-tipping is just one of Croydon’s myriad problems.
It recently emerged that the borough has the greatest volume of stalking, harassment and sexual offences anywhere in London. According to Met Police figures, Croydon saw over 1,200 cases of sexual assault in the year to March and over 2,500 incidents of stalking and harassment. (Admittedly, as Croydon Council stressed, the borough is also London’s most populous, though that hardly detracts from the alarming figures.)
Furthermore, the council is in debt to the tune of a staggering £1.6billion and has been declared effectively bankrupt on three separate occasions since 2020. This year, the council will spend £71million on servicing that debt alone. The dire financial outlook means the resources to halt the borough’s alarming demise simply don’t exist.
No wonder residents were bemused when it emerged that Croydon also has the greatest number of asylum hotels in London. The Government has effectively requisitioned five premises across the borough to house arrivals, with locals telling the Daily Mail certain unsavoury residents have exacerbated an already significant drug problem.
This isn’t a landfill site at all. It’s a playing field in the London borough of Croydon, an area suffering from a fly-tipping epidemic
So just how did this once proud borough become not so much the dustbin of London as the shame of Britain – and a paradigm for national decline?
No one understands Croydon’s fly-tipping problem like 68-year-old Graham Mitchell, who moved to Thornton Heath in 1996. The retiree has reported 18,000 incidents to the council in the last year alone. Trudging across his home ward of Bensham Manor ‘most days’, he was averaging 58 reports a day through May and June. ‘Last Christmas Eve, I reported 122 fly-tips; that’s the best I’ve ever done in one day.’
Graham reports via an app called Love Clean Streets, which is supposed to prompt the local waste contractor, Veolia UK, into action. ‘There have been issues with the contractors,’ says Graham. ‘Issues around them closing reports prematurely, not collecting items, items having to be reported multiple times.’
So how did the problem get so bad? The council’s finances are ‘shot’, says Graham, but he also blames people in temporary accommodation ‘who might not show the same pride and values as long-term residents’.
‘And also, there isn’t proper enforcement to stop fly-tippers.’ Indeed, in March 2022, the previous Labour council did away with neighbourhood safety officers – the frontline of prevention.
Figures from earlier this year revealed that there had been just 11 prosecutions for littering in the previous 12 months. There may be signs up around Croydon declaring a possible 12-month prison sentence and £50,000 fine for fly-tipping, but without enforcement these are empty threats.
Yet, having put Veolia’s contract out to tender, a lack of takers meant the borough renewed it on April 1 this year – an eight-year deal reportedly worth around £40million. Veolia told the Daily Mail they ‘work hard to provide a reliable service’ and clear ‘an average of 234 fly-tips per day’.
A further twist to the dirty tale is the growth in the number of rogue waste collectors. John Roberts, chief service officer at the environmental enforcement firm Kingdom LAS, told the Daily Mail that social media is being used by cowboy contractors without a waste-carrying licence to attract custom.
‘They take your money and then dump the waste in the countryside or even just in the middle of the road,’ he said.
Environmental protection legislation from 2018 means individuals are liable for where their waste ends up, regardless of who disposes of it. ‘People need to make sure they know where their waste is going, so they don’t find themselves on the end of an investigation,’ says John.
A bed and other rubbish is dumped down a lane in Croydon, more fly-tipping lies only a few metres away
Myra and her 31-year-old granddaughter Georgina. Things have become so bad that Myra admits keeping a foot-long wooden truncheon hanging beside her front door
He ends with a sobering warning: ‘It’s unsightly. But it’s also a public health risk. One of the locations we worked on in Dartford back in 2021 had a ton of raw meat dumped there every month. That brought vermin, of course. We also find asbestos on numerous fly-tips around the country.’
‘Fly-tipping? Don’t get me started!’ laughed 70-year-old Croydon resident Myra Marsh.
‘The alleyway off my cul-de-sac is full of it. It’s so bad that the council come Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to pick it all up. I’m sorry but it smells like s***. My neighbour has rats in her garden from people hurling rice and chicken bones. Another neighbour reported someone for doing it and they got a brick through their window.’
It quickly becomes clear, as I talk with Myra and her 31-year-old granddaughter Georgina, that fly-tipping is just one part of a broader picture of decline here.
‘Croydon has become a no-go area,’ Myra continues, pointing to her granddaughter. ‘She won’t let me out into town on my own anymore. I’ve got a Ring doorbell; my daughter has put cameras everywhere. My 82-year-old neighbour’s been mugged four times recently. The last time, she didn’t realise it was happening. She’d drawn out all her pension at the post office and they followed her home.’
Things have become so bad that Myra admits keeping a foot-long wooden truncheon hanging beside her front door. ‘I know it’s an offensive weapon. But I don’t feel safe. I moved from the East End when I was 18 and I give as good as I get.’
‘You can’t even talk to anyone or smile at anyone now,’ adds Georgina. ‘If you do, people go “What you looking at?” The youngsters have nothing to do so they take their anger out on other people. There used to be community here. Not any more.’
As for Croydon leading the way in London for reported sexual offences, Myra is not surprised: ‘I’ve seen people, I don’t know what ethnicity they are, on buses putting their hands up young girls’ skirts. The girls cry “stop it” and the men pretend they were reaching for their phones, but you can clearly see they’re already holding their phones.’
This, of course, is a community where the brutal rape and murder of 18-year-old model Sally Anne Bowman in 2005 lingers in the memory. Sally Anne’s mother recently spoke about the surge in sexual offences in Croydon: ‘Things are far worse for women than when my Sally Anne was killed. I’m not surprised about Croydon – I’ve been warning about it for two decades and women are still not safe.’
Janet and Janice – friends in their 70s walking in Croydon town centre – didn’t want to tell the Daily Mail their real names because ‘we still have to live here!’
Shocking amounts of fly tipping in a public sports ground next to Croydon Athletic Football Club where children continue to try playing football
For local shopkeeper Hussain, 42, open drug dealing is the biggest problem in Croydon
Nonetheless, Janice said: ‘Fly-tipping is a major problem. A lot of people who come from elsewhere don’t have the same attitude to waste. To them it’s just “get rid of it. It’s somebody else’s problem.”’ ‘The other day I had a clothes horse thrown into my garden,’ added Janet. ‘But there’s anti-socials everywhere. I live past West Croydon and the station has drug takers at nine in the morning. We’ve known better times round here.’
‘They’ve taken all the decent shops away,’ added Janice. ‘The heart of the community has gone. It’s like living in the Caribbean with all the new shops. I like diversity but it’s gone too far the other way.’
For local shopkeeper Hussain, 42, open drug dealing is the biggest problem in Croydon. ‘It’s happening in front of the police,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘But they can’t do anything about it. There just aren’t enough officers to manage large gangs.’
Unsurprisingly, it’s affected his business. ‘Walk down this street and you’ll have to walk past 15 or 20 teenagers dealing drugs. There are lots of asylum seekers here and they walk around the High Street randomly, which scares people. It used to be really busy here but now there’s little passing trade because people – especially my wealthier customers – are too scared.’
Croydon Council told the Daily Mail it was ‘working hard to get finances back on track and deal with the legacy of past financial mismanagement.’ It also promised ‘swift enforcement action’ against fly-tipping as it is a priority for mayor Jason Perry.
Next May, however, Croydon will elect a new mayor. With Reform UK surging in the polls across the country, perhaps this could be an opportunity for Nigel Farage’s stable to show they have what it takes to turn a community around?
Maybe not, for the woman Reform chose to run as their candidate in the election – 70-year-old Sharon Carby from Bradford – sadly turned out to have been dead for six months.
Fitting, perhaps, for a borough in terminal decline.
