Bexley Council has just announced that it is increasing the maximum fine for illegal fly tipping from £400 to the new legal limit of £1,000. Campaigners say putting up fines is a good start but more action needs to be taken to tackle the issue. Fly-tipping is a criminal offence, external under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. According to the environmental charity, Keep Britain Tidy, fly-tipping is defined as the illegal deposit of any waste on to land that does not have a licence to accept it and costs councils millions of pounds, external each year to clear up. In 2020 the government set up a new unit to tackle the most serious fly tipping cases. The Joint Unit for Waste Crime is targeting the organised criminal gangs that make millions by dumping waste on an industrial scale. Councils are able to issue on-the-spot fines to fly-tippers of up to £1,000 and can stop, search and seize vehicles suspected of being used for fly-tipping. Local authorities and the Environment Agency are also able to issue penalties of up to £1,000 to householders who do not pass their waste to a licensed carrier and whose waste is then found fly-tipped. Fly-tippers can also be prosecuted and taken to court, which can lead to a significant fine and/or up to 12 months imprisonment if convicted in a Magistrates’ Court or an unlimited fine and/or up to 5 years imprisonment if convicted in a Crown Court. Fly-tipping prosecutions are “highly successful”, Defra says, with over 98 percent of prosecutions resulting in a conviction in 2021/22. The Environment Agency is also clamping down on waste crime and large-scale illegal dumping. Between 2020 and 2023, the Agency stopped illegal waste activity at 2,700 sites and initiated 191 prosecutions for illegal waste sites, with 39 prison sentences handed down. It also issued fines of over £1.1m for illegal waste sites, plus £5.5m in Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 confiscation orders. In 2021/22 alone, the Agency prosecuted nearly 100 individuals and companies for waste crime offences, with fines exceeding £900,000, 28 custodial sentences and £1m of confiscation orders. A poll has been carried out by a furniture company into the public’s attitude towards fly tipping; the results, if accurate, are quite surprising. An astonishing seventeen percent of the people surveyed admitted having fly tipped on at least one occasion. Of that seventeen percent, the reasons they stated for their fly tipping broke down as follows:- 1. There is nowhere else to take rubbish (38 percent) 2. Unaware it was illegal (30 percent) 3. It was the easiest option available (28 percent) 4. The cost of disposing properly was too high (20 percent) 5. Because they didn’t realise they were fly-tipping at the time (16 percent). I find this utterly staggering, and frankly somewhat hard to believe; for a start, if the respondents were only allowed to pick one response, how come it adds up to 132 percent?. According to Government statistics, local authorities reported 852,000 cases of fly-tipping last year, and almost 98 percent of fly-tipping prosecutions resulted in a conviction. I feel that the responses listed above are actually covering the real truth. From my own experiences investigating fly – tipping, the proponents are well aware of what they are doing is illegal – but they just don't care, as they think the chances of them being caught are minimal at best. It is a cynical and exploitative attitude from criminals who should (and indeed sometimes do) get jailed for their activities. What do you think? Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
Last week marked 500 years since Lesnes Abbey’s dissolution and Danson Park celebrated its centenary and Crossness Pumping Station celebrated 160 years since its opening. On top of this, last week also marked the 60th anniversary of the creation of the London Borough of Bexley.
Following a recent article I wrote on local history, a long time reader and occasional contributor, who chooses to remain anonymous, wrote the following piece for publication:- "I started my working life at The Midland Bank in Bexleyheath in August 1961 the staff were very friendly to a shy 17 year old and after about six weeks I was sent to a 4 weeks training course by Holborn Circus in London. On my return to Bexleyheath I was full of the newly learnt knowledge which was soon wasted as they had a better way of doing things!. Shortly afterwards I was transferred to their Erith branch close to the crossroads of Pier Road and the High Street. This was a very old cramped premises compared to the new Bexleyheath branch. I used to catch the 122a bus from Parsonage Manorway and I needed to walk down Pier Road each morning. I always thought the shops there were fascinating especially Owens Ironmongers at the top with all their wares on the pavement outside (somebody had that job early in the morning and again in the evening). The LEB was next and then a few shops in a new block that previously was on the site of the old Ritz cinema. I used to cross over by Blundell's at Cross Street and look in the camera shop before heading down past MacFisheries, V V Carrier's bakers, Woolworths, Bardens TV shop etc. On the corner was the Westminster Bank which was a much grander building to the Midland opposite. As a junior there I used to do 'The Locals' where I would visit the other Erith banks before they opened to the public at 10:00. This was to 'clear' the local cheques drawn on Barclays and Westminster banks. I used to enjoy my lunchtimes walking around the town visiting places like the sandwich shop run by a German man, looking and buying from Mr Woods in Alibars. Mitchell's had unfortunately closed when I arrived there so that was the only blot on the town. Occasionally I had lunch in the Prince of Wales restaurant with white tablecloths and napkins with a fellow junior. After the bank closed and when the books were balanced it was my job with the other junior to go to the Post Office to cash the Postal Orders and send the paperwork and cheques to Head Office. We would walk back along the High Street passing the Locomotive and head up as far as the Prince of Wales to await the 122a bus home. The Bank was doubled in size during my time there to become 88-90 High Street which was a vast improvement for staff and customers. My memories are still very vivid of most of the shops in the town - Boots the Chemist was close to the closed Mitchell's store with Williams grocers, Stevens the butchers (They had another shop at the Pantiles near where I lived).There were two Gentleman's outfitters (Clares & Fenton's?) that I used as well as the large Burton's Tailoring with the dance hall that I once attended. In Pier Road other shops were the GAS shop, Dimascio's Ice Cream Parlor, Dewhursts and in the High Street other shops were Derrett & Dormans, Crown Wallpapers, Invicta Carpets, DER TV rentals, Llewellyns DIY shop, Tip Top Bakeries, RACS, Selfe Jewellers, Paul and Smiler Panayi brothers barbers and hairdressers, Raxworthy Opticians, Howells & Harrisons Chemist to name some. As I said I really liked the town but sadly I was transferred to the Bank's Lewisham branch in 1965 so I never saw the Victorian Erith Town again. My personal memories from 60 years ago."
As regular readers will be aware, I have a strong interest in obsolete audio and video recording formats, and the often ingenious engineering that they employed. Last week I featured the short lived and unsuccessful analogue audio format known as Elcaset, which was sold by the now long gone HiFi shop Whomes in Bexleyheath Broadway. Following some very positive feedback from some readers, this week I am covering another audio format, also developed by Sony - but this time in digital format. This year marks the 32nd anniversary of the launch of the MiniDisc format in the UK. The MiniDisc format began as a research project in the labs of electronics giant Sony in the early 1990s. In those pre- smart phone, pre-flash memory days, engineers were struggling with the problem of how to make music portable. Sony was riding high on the success of their Walkman analogue cassette players, which had come to dominate the market in the 1980s. But they were bumping up against the limits of the media: both cassette tape and CD Walkman devices really could not get any smaller, because the medium itself was the limiting factor. Devices like the cassette tape Walkman WM-EX88 and the CD D-J50 were not much bigger than the cases that the cassette tape and CD were stored in: they literally could not get much smaller and still hold the tape or CD. What was needed, Sony decided, was a new way to store music. This new format was the MiniDisc. This development was spurred by two inventions: a new audio compression format called ATRAC and a storage system called the magneto-optical disc. The Adaptive Transform Acoustic Codec (ATRAC) was developed by Sony engineers who figured out an important fact: your ears are good, but not that good. They are attuned to picking up certain sounds better than others. Specifically, if there are two sounds at similar frequencies, your ear can’t separate the two. This is especially true of high frequencies: our ears are more attuned to picking out low frequencies like the rustle of a tiger in a nearby tree. At higher frequencies, your ear is not able to pick out the details. So, what ATRAC does is to effectively lump these frequencies together, losing the specific details that your ear can’t hear anyway. (That’s the theory, at least; audiophiles will argue otherwise, but let’s leave that aside for the moment). ATRAC breaks the sound down into 24 frequency bands, and selectively compresses the sound, with smaller bands (that preserve more of the detail) at lower and middle frequencies, but losing a lot in the high bands. There is much more to the process than that (you can read all of the details here - trust me, it is extremely technical), but the end product is that it compresses the sound down so that the ATRAC version is one fifth of the size of the CD version. Each disc could hold 74 or 80 minutes of music, although this could be expanded with later models that could compress the music more to hold up to 320 minutes. The first MiniDisc players were launched in 1993, accompanied by a large advertising campaign touting the benefits of the new format. Initially, Sony tried to pitch it as an alternative to CD, a new format where you would buy albums on a MiniDisc. The first pre-recorded album was Emotions by Mariah Carey, which was perhaps indicative of the state of mind at Sony after the launch was a spectacular failure, with Sony reportedly selling less than 50,000 players in the first year. The MiniDisc never caught on as a pre-recorded music format, as CDs were the music format that everyone used. Never ones to admit defeat, Sony decided to try again in 1996. This time, they decided to play up the recordable and reusable aspects of MiniDisc, touting their new discs and portable players as being tougher, better and cooler than CD or tape, because you could easily move tracks from CD or tape to MiniDisc, then skip or shuffle tracks on the player. This relaunch met with some success: the MiniDisc players were lighter and more flexible than CD players, and they offered the skip protection and shuffle play features that cassette tape players were missing. Other manufacturers (such as Aiwa and Sharp) supported the format and started offering recorders and players. The new breed of portable MiniDisc players could record music directly from the digital output of a CD player, so the quality was great. You could also sacrifice quality for more music, storing up to 320 minutes of audio on those that supported the higher compression levels. One niche market that loved the MiniDisc were radio journalists. The aforementioned ability to write to MiniDiscs meant that you could record to them with many portable MiniDisc devices, and the ATRAC compression worked extremely well for voices and ambient sound recordings. It didn’t have quite the premium audio quality of DAT (Digital Audio Tape), but it was cheaper and more reliable than the notoriously mechanically finicky DAT recorders. The game was soon up, however, when Apple announced the iPod. The benefits of the iPod over the MiniDisc were obvious: the first iPods offered 5GB of capacity that meant up to 1000 songs, or hundreds of hours of music, while each MiniDisc held just 320 minutes at most. And the iPod didn’t ask where the music came from, or limit how you could copy it: it accepted most MP3 files without complaint or limitation. This caused a seismic shift in this industry: the iPod went on to sell millions, while the MiniDisc remained a niche product that was loved by some, but ignored by most. The writing was on the wall. The MiniDisc format lost ground over the early 2000s as MP3 players got better and better. Even the uniqueness of MiniDisc being able to record audio on the player was lost, as solid state recording devices started offering more flexible recording and editing features than MiniDisc ever could for professional users. The advent and widespread use of smart phones only exacerbated this situation. The Minidisc format was discontinued by Sony in early 2013, though many fan sites and third party resources are still available for a product that never really made it out of a niche.
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