Deal struck over litter fines

Officials at Doncaster are to take up the handling of fines and appeals for their South Yorkshire neighbours, under a shared service agreement.

Both council's cabinets have now agreed to the arrangement.

Doncaster is looking at doing work for Rotherham Council. Rotherham is looking to adopt a similar system to one already running in Doncaster involving private contractors dishing out fixed penalty notices. Doncaster would do administrative work for Rotherham around the fines and evaluating evidence.

A report by Doncaster Council head of service regulation and enforcement Tracey Harwood and enforcement manager Carolina Borgstrom said: “Environmental crimes do not differ or stop across authority boundaries, but instead travel with nuisance individuals between authority areas."

The new arrangement has been brought in after figures for Doncaster showed that for dog fouling, the number of complaints fell 24 per cent from 457 in the first half of 2106 to 349 in the first half of 2017. Littering complaints were down by 19 per cent from 1,352 to 1,091.

But cabinet member for the environment, Coun Chris McGuinness, said the number of fines issued had not fallen.

Doncaster Council signed a contract with Kingdom Security in January 2016 to provide additional environmental enforcement across the borough.

The contract includes offences relating to littering, smoking in smokefree places/vehicles, fly tipping and enforcement of Public Space Protection Orders including dog fouling and parking enforcement. Doncaster officials will now deal with processing fines for similar offences in Rotherham.