National litter and flytipping strategy: baseline report

Methodology

The project followed a three-step approach to gathering data.

Stage 1 – Scoping

The project began with a scoping period where we confirmed the data to be gathered with SEPA and relevant project stakeholders. In addition, we agreed the key stakeholders for primary data collection.

It was agreed with SEPA during the scoping stage that the baseline should cover the most recent time period possible. As such the baseline, where possible, covers the 2022/23 financial year (April 2022 to March 2023). 2022/23 was also chosen because it was felt that this data should be readily available in local authority’s internal systems. It was also important to get as up to date data as possible, and 2020/21 and 2021/22 data are likely influenced by the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of national lockdowns on waste services.

Stage 2 – Rapid evidence review

Following the scoping period a rapid evidence review was undertaken to gather and analyse data already in the public domain. Following previous work in this area and knowledge of what data is publicly available we anticipated that we would be able to obtain the following data from open data sources:

• People proceeded against in Scottish Courts (total prosecuted and total convicted);
• Outcome of convictions in Scottish Courts (monetary, other, community service, custody);
• Total number of people prosecuted and convicted in Scottish Courts by local authority;
• Non-court disposal route (direct measure e.g., fiscal fine, fiscal warning, recorded police warning); and
• Fixed Monetary Penalties (FMPs) and Variable Monetary Penalties (VMPs) issued by SEPA.

As outlined in the introduction, flytipping incidents are not a nationally reported statistic, and local authorities are not required to report on the number of incidents that are submitted into their systems or which they manage. As such, systems such as Waste Data Flow (which are commonly used in England for reporting flytipping incidents), are not commonly used by Scottish local authorities for capturing flytipping incidents and therefore contain limited relevant information.

Stage 3 – Forming the baseline

Given flytipping incidents, and enforcement actions undertaken by some enforcement bodies are not commonly reported on, it was necessary to gather primary data from key stakeholders:

• SEPA – unlike local authorities, SEPA is required to publish information about enforcement actions undertaken. This data was obtained from the SEPA website during stage 2. In addition, SEPA hold data on flytipping incidents that have been reported into Dumb Dumpers prior to this service being closed. Data from this system was sought from SEPA for the purposes of developing the baseline.
• Local Authorities – Scotland has 32 local authorities, all of whom are likely to collect data slightly differently via their online and telephone reporting systems. As part of the project Anthesis approached all 32 local authorities (see Appendix 1 for a detailed overview of the methodology) for data covering:
  • The number of flytipping incidents reported into the local authority in the time period, where possible split by month, size of the instance, waste type and land type and the number of FPNs issued by the local authority for flytipping offences in the time period.
  • In addition we asked local authorities for views on a limited number of qualitative questions, as outlined in Appendix 1.
• Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park Authority – the National Park Authority has enforcement powers and can issue FPNs for flytipping offences. We contacted the National Park Authority for information on incidents and enforcement actions in the specified time period.
• Police Scotland – while the police are likely to have a lower number of cases reported to them (given local authorities are the main reporting route for flytipping incidents) we approached Police Scotland to see what data could be obtained.
• Private landowners – we anticipated this to be the most challenging stakeholder group to gather data from due to the wide variety in stakeholder types and also because flytipping incidents may not be recorded by individual landowners, organisations that manage private land or membership groups. Given this challenge, SEPA raised the project at Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime (SPARC) as they are a member. In addition, SEPA issued an online survey to a private landowner working group. Questions included in the survey can be found in Appendix 2.

Flytipping incidents, and enforcement actions, are often a topic that get picked up in local and national press. As a result of this, and from previous project experience, Anthesis was aware that the Scottish Liberal Democrats had issued FOI requests to all 32 Scottish Local Authorities. Anthesis had access to this data for 2021/22 and approached the Scottish Liberal Democrats for the updated 2022/23 data set. The aim of obtaining this data was to compare primary data collected from local authorities with that submitted under FOI and use the secondary FOI data to fill any gaps in primary data.

Once the primary data was obtained it was cleaned, with a degree of data rationalisation taking place. This was mainly around the reporting categories used for land type, size of the flytipping incident and waste type. Different local authorities use slightly different categories, so Anthesis rationalised the data to combine similar categories. In addition, instances clearly marked as duplications or not flytipping were removed. See Appendix 3 – data rationalisationfor an overview of the data rationalisation.