A dog owner has been fined £100 for walking her Welsh Springer Spaniel without a waste bag.
Paula said she was stopped by a council officer in Northampton town centre ‘for a poo my dog didn’t do’.
Despite saying her dog did not foul on the pavement, Paula said she was fined because she had forgotten to bring a plastic bag.
‘She’d already been out for her business that day and it was a very short walk through the town centre so I knew that she wasn’t going to do anything,’ Paula said.
‘Unusually, I didn’t have any in any of my pockets, and so I was unable to say that I had a poo bag with me. So what happened? I was fined on the spot, £100 for a poo she didn’t do.’
She added that she knew it was a legal requirement to clean up mess after dogs, but not any rule about carrying bags.
‘I honestly thought that I would be giving words of advice, told off, told what the law was so that I knew for next time, but there was no movement,’ she said.
The baffling fine comes after a woman was slapped with a £150 penalty by council officers in Richmond, west London, after pouring the remnants of her coffee down the drain.
Paula (pictured) said she was stopped by a council officer in Northampton town centre and fined for not carrying a waste bag
Paula, who asked not to share her surname, described the enforcement officer as ‘polite, but very firm,’ and felt she ‘was an easy target’.
A West Northamptonshire Council spokesperson said: ‘It’s really important that if people walk their dogs in a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) area they have the means to pick up after them in case they foul in a public area.’
Established in 2014, PSPOs allow councils to set local rules to tackle community issues.
The council spokesperson said officers will fine dog owners who do not have a means of cleaning up, as part of PSPO requirements.
Paula was one of hundreds of people who shared their story through Your Voice, Your BBC after a woman in west London was fined £150 for pouring coffee down a road gully.
Burcu Yesilyurt, from Kew, west London, said she tipped a small amount of the drink from her reusable cup down the road gully because she didn’t want to spill it on the bus.
But moments later, she was ‘shocked’ to see three male enforcement officers ‘chasing’ her down the street as she stood at the bus stop near Richmond station.
The officers fined her £150 under Section 33 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, reduced to £100 if she paid within 14 days.
Burcu Yesilyurt (pictured) was slapped with a £150 fine by council officers after pouring the remnants of her coffee down the drain
Richmond-upon-Thames Council insisted its officers ‘acted professionally and objectively’ and were ‘justified’ in issuing the fine.
The council later said it had cancelled the fine and is ‘reviewing our advice on the disposal of liquids in a public place’.
Also in west London, a woman said she was fined for fly-tipping after an unopened envelope with her name on was found in an alley near her home.
After receiving the council letter, Victoria said she was ‘shaking’ and that she ‘burst into tears’.
She responded to the council letter to say she had never seen the envelope, but she still the £400 to avoid the sum rising to £600.
However, she later had the fine cancelled and refunded after contacting her local councillor.
An Ealing Council spokesperson said they had followed the ‘usual process’ of locating the parcel in a fly tip which contained the resident’s details.
However, they added that the fine was incorrect and issued an apology to Ms Wells.
In Birmingham, a man said he was given a £100 fine for dropping a strawberry stalk down a roadside drain during the city’s bin strike.
Kleo Papas, 58, who was on a work trip in Birmingham, said he was given a £100 fine for dropping a strawberry stalk down a roadside drain during the city’s bin strike
Kleo Papas, 58, who was on a work trip, could not find a bin when finishing a strawberry, so he decided to drop it down a drain.
An enforcement officer from the council then approached him, saying he ‘got all that on camera’.
He believed that because it was organic material it was fine to go down the drain, adding that if he had ‘thought that constituted littering, [he] would have just put it in [his] pocket’.
Mr Papas appealed the fine but was unsuccessful and said he paid the £100 fine, which he felt was excessive.
A Birmingham City Council spokesperson said: ‘We cannot find any record of Mr Papas receiving a FPN for disposing of a strawberry stalk.’
