Fined for feeding the ducks and picking up litter. How ‘Stasi-like' councils are ripping off Britain
While serious criminal behaviour all too often goes unpunished, councils across the country are increasingly issuing fines for misdemeanours as innocuous as putting the bins out early or feeding the ducks.
After one west London man was penalised with a fixed penalty notice (FPN) for putting his bins out early last month – more on which below – the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, warned that local authorities were veering into 'Stasi-like control of people's lives'.
'Instead of cracking down on genuine antisocial behaviour, the state tries to reassert itself by punishing well-meaning people for tiny infringements,' he told The Telegraph. 'It's the easy thing to do but it's counter-productive and unfair.'
Indeed, on-the-spot penalties – condemned by critics as 'busybody fines' – have been rising for years. Data show such fines soared by 42 per cent in the year to 2023, resulting in nearly 20,000 FPNs being dished out, according to research conducted by civil liberties group the Manifesto Club.
Although nominally aimed at cracking down on offences such as loitering and littering (offering local authorities a way to deal with relatively minor transgressions outside of court), the seemingly heavy-handed use of these penalties in a justice system where people convicted of grave crimes are often handed short or suspended sentences seems ever more unjustifiable.
Here are some of the most egregious examples…
Martin Fielder had given up his job to care for his young children after the death of his wife when he was hit with a £500 fine and the threat of a criminal record in February this year.
His misdemeanour? An errant envelope that he suspects flew out of his recycling bin.
After the envelope had been found by a council warden 250ft from his house, Fielder was accused of fly-tipping in a letter sent by District Enforcement, a private contractor of Welwyn Hatfield borough council that issues FPNs on commission. The ensuing back-and-forth with the council, he said, has left him in a state of 'constant anxiety'.
'The letter stated that if the fine was not paid within 28 days, the matter would be referred to the magistrates' court, where I could go to prison for up to 12 months or receive a bigger fine, or both,' Fielder told The Guardian newspaper. Fielder explained that strong winds the night before could have caused the packaging to fly out of his recycling bin, and the company downgraded the charge to a £100 littering fine. He is now deciding whether to challenge the penalty in court.
As in Fielder's case, the administration of FPNs is often outsourced from cash-strapped councils to third-party contractors, prompting critics to suggest the system is used to replenish local authorities' coffers and wide open to exploitation.
Indeed, the Manifesto Club's research indicated that the 39 local authorities which employed private enforcement companies were behind 14,633 of the penalties served in 2023, while 261 councils that did not issued just 4,529 by comparison.
'While councils fire off fixed penalty notices for fly-away envelopes, real criminals are being let off the hook,' says William Yarwood of the TaxPayers' Alliance. 'Taxpayers will be rightly jaded that trivial mishaps are being met with extortionate fines. Councils need to make sure that the private companies they hire don't have skewed incentives that encourage the handing out of fines merely to make a profit.'
In November last year, Harrow council issued a five-year-old girl with a £1,000 FPN that claimed she had been 'witnessed by a uniformed officer… committing the offence of fly-tipping'. What had actually happened, according to the girl's father, was that parcel packaging with her name on it had been found on a neighbouring street due to overfilled communal bins.
The child was then sent a 'final reminder' letter from the local authority's enforcement team the month after, which advised that it was 'about to instruct the council's legal team to start court proceedings'.
Her father branded the fine 'absurd' and, after failing to resolve the issue himself, went to a ward surgery held by his local councillor. The issue was then raised at a council cabinet meeting, after which APCOA, the private contractor used by Harrow council to issue FPNs, apologised and the fine was dropped.
Faye Borg, 82, was in Morden Hall Park, a National Trust property, in August last year when she was fined £150 for feeding the ducks. She was approached by two council wardens, who issued an FPN that said a 'female was seen throwing biscuits' into the River Wandle.
Borg alleges that the two wardens, who worked for Kingdom, a company contracted to provide environmental enforcement services to local authorities, followed her to her doorstep, demanding she 'pay the fine on the spot'.
Merton council subsequently apologised, sent a senior member to Borg's home with flowers, and said it was 'taking this matter up with our contractor to ensure that it does not happen again'.
'These kinds of absurd fines exist only because the companies are being paid per fine,' says Josie Appleton, the founder of the Manifesto Club. 'The Government is reviewing fining for profit, but it's taking far too long to do something about it. So long as wardens are being paid per fine, this is going to happen, no matter how many regulations are in place.'
Hammersmith and Fulham council fined Clyde Strachan £1,000 for 'fly-tipping' in May when he put his bins out a few hours early.
The 37-year-old was going away from his home for a few days, so he put his rubbish and recycling out at midday the day before the refuse was due to be collected.
'I deliberately put them out of the way on the pavement, tucked to one side against the wall so they weren't in anyone's way,' he said. 'It meant I had put them out about six or seven hours before… I would normally take them there.'
When he returned home, however, he was issued with a £1,000 FPN, reduced to £500 if it were paid early. It stated: 'There was one large box, six bags of waste, and one food bin deposited on the pavement and left. It isn't collection day so it shouldn't be there.'
The penalty was cancelled after Strachan appealed. He argued it was 'excessive' given he had made an 'honest mistake'.
Last month, Richard Cameron, 45, was found guilty of four cycling offences for pedalling down Victoria Street in Grimsby town centre, which is subject to a public spaces protection order intended to deal with recurrent antisocial behaviour.
In a press release, North East Lincolnshire council said that Cameron had received four FPNs for 'recurrent cycling offences' but 'had not paid the fines and was therefore summoned to Grimsby magistrates' court'.
It continued: 'Also being prosecuted that day was Viktorija Kosareva, 28, of Smith Square, Doncaster, who was summoned for not paying an FPN she received for walking her dog on Cleethorpes beach when not permitted to do so… Neither individual attended court and both were proven guilty in their absence.'
Cameron was ordered to pay £1,224, consisting of a £660 fine, £264 victim surcharge and costs of £300.
Rubbish dumped on Veronika Mike and Zoltan Pinter's street in Stoke-on-Trent had started to attract rats, so they took matters into their own hands.
The couple said the area had been blighted with 'disgusting' litter for years and 'just wanted it clean', so collected the refuse into an old cardboard box – addressed to Pinter – that he placed by his bins in the hope that it would be taken away by Stoke-on-Trent city council.
'I couldn't put it in the bins because they were full, so I left it beside them,' he said.
A week later, Pinter was issued an FPN for 'an offence of failing to transfer waste to an authorised person', and fined £600. Mike was fined the same, despite her name not appearing on the cardboard box. The couple are paying the penalty in monthly instalments.
When Violet Cooper, 38, arrived to collect Juliet, her lost chow-chow dog, in August last year, she was issued with a notice requiring her to update the microchip details within 21 days (microchipping has been compulsory for pet cats and dogs since April 2016).
Cooper failed to do so, and last month was found guilty at Salisbury magistrates' court of failing to comply with the notice. She was fined £847.59 – a fine of £220, plus £539.59 in costs and an £88 victim surcharge.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
The police must do better, not more
Writing in The Telegraph on Monday, two prominent officers lamented the current state of policing in Britain. Nick Smart, president of the Police Superintendents' Association, and Tiff Lynch, chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said morale had been crushed by a broken system. 'The service is in crisis,' they wrote. Pay was too low, work was too hard and the police are facing further real terms cuts in spending when the Chancellor makes her dispositions known today. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, was reportedly battling with the Treasury until the 11th hour trying to get more money for policing but failed. She has been under pressure from senior officers for weeks to get a better deal. They said there may have been more money and more officers but these trends had not kept pace with the rise in the population. Yet overall per-capita police numbers are now close to record levels. We used to have far fewer police officers and yet they were far more visible. Their presence on the streets was designed to fulfil Robert Peel's first principle of policing, which is to keep order and prevent crime. Police chiefs maintain that they direct scarce resources where they are most needed and yet this is impossible to square with stories of half a dozen officers being sent to arrest someone for sending an injudicious tweet to a school website. A news report just this week is emblematic of the problem: the couple who went to reclaim their own stolen car because the police refused to do anything about it. There have been many cases of bikes put up for sale by thieves and owners having to recover their property because the police were not interested. Our politicians must share the blame for loading the police with tasks they never used to have by passing laws that require any complaint of hurt feelings, however minor or vindictively made, to be investigated. But the police seem content to prioritise these non-crimes over real ones like burglary, thefts of mobile phones or shoplifting. The problem the police have when demanding more money is that the public no longer feels they make the right choices with the resources they have. Nowadays, they are less a force for law and order than a glorified community service, expected to deal with society's ills rather than crime. As a matter of urgency, they need to forge a new social contract with the people they serve. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
LA police shot my photographer in the head
A pepper ball round thwacks my colleague in the side of the head as we run away from police. A cloud of the irritant fills the air, coating my goggles, followed by a crackle and the glare of flash bangs. 'Go, go, go!' he shouts. Police officers are firing into the crowd protesting against Donald Trump's immigration crackdown in downtown Los Angeles. Once again, reporters appear to be in the crosshairs. Jon Putman, The Telegraph's photographer, took a blow to the head, one of many journalists hit or detained since protests broke out on Friday. Jon was struck in the ear, narrowly avoiding a serious injury. 'If it hit me right in the head it would have knocked me down and I would have been out of commission,' he said. Los Angeles is being heavily militarised. Mr Trump sent in 1,700 of National Guard over the weekend, and a further 700 marines on Monday. There are now more US soldiers here than in Syria. We weren't the only journalists to come under fire amidst the protests on Monday night, which appear to be shrinking in scale but not have been more than two dozen attacks on reporters covering the Los Angeles riots in the past few days, with clearly identified members of the press having been shot at point-blank range by police officers. An Australian broadcaster was shot in the leg, a New York Post photographer in the head and a CNN reporter was briefly detained live on air. Credit: CNN British photojournalist Nick Stern required emergency surgery after being shot by an explosive round on Saturday. Sergio Olmos, an investigative reporter for the nonprofit news outlet CalMatters, told the Washington Post that he had never seen more non-lethal rounds used at a protest. On Monday evening, the smell of paint lingered in the air in Los Angeles as teenagers spray painted the pavements, walls and bus stops with slogans such as 'fight hate with hate' and 'I'll be here till I decide not to be'. Snipers stationed on the roof of the Federal Building watched through binoculars as protesters climbed traffic lights and revved their motorcycles. A black Cybertruck graffitied with 'f--- ICE' [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] was filmed driving around the protest with a Mexican flag attached to the back. On Sunday, demonstrators torched self-driving cars, threw Molotov cocktails, fireworks and scooters at police officers. Officers have fired non-lethal rounds into crowds, and in at least one instance were filmed firing pepper ball rounds (small plastic bullets filled with irritant) point blank at a protester before hitting him with batons. Credit: @Julio_Rosas11/X In another, ICE officers swept in on a man in a yellow jacket before tackling him to the ground and arresting him, while other protesters were detained, their hands zip-tied behind their backs, and put into police vans. The protests erupted in the city on Friday in response to ICE officers conducting a string of raids as part of Mr Trump's aggressive immigration policies. More than 40 people – said to be day labourers – were targeted at a Home Depot car park and Ambiance Apparel, a clothing manufacturer, in LA's fashion district. The crackdown is the Trump administration's latest test to the limits to his presidential authority to force Democrat-run states to adhere to federal decree, while also attempting to show its might by ordering troops onto the streets. US Marines have been deployed domestically for major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attacks in 2001, but it is extremely rare for the military to be used for domestic policing. When all the deployed officers arrive, it will mean there are more than 4,000 troops in Los Angeles, more than double the number of US troops in Syria. Credit: Sergio Olmos/X The news of yet more reinforcements further inflamed tensions between Gavin Newsom, the California governor, and Mr Trump, who continued to publicly attack each other on Monday. Mr Newsom, who has sued the administration to try and block the deployment of marines and troops, accused the Trump administration of mistreating those already in the city, of which only 300 have so far have been deployed. Sharing a picture of troops dressed in fatigues sleeping on the floor, Mr Newsom wrote: 'If anyone is treating our troops disrespectfully, it is you.'He urged the US president to 'grow up' and urged him 'get it over with, arrest me, move on, if you need some head to scalp do it with me'. Justifying the decision to deploy troops to Los Angeles, Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, claimed ICE agents were targeting the 'worst of the worst' – criminal illegal immigrants hiding among law-abiding communities. But advocates for immigrants' rights have argued that day labourers being detained outside Home Depot stores suggests otherwise. Julie Flores, 21, wrapped herself in a Mexican flag as she stood on the bonnet of a black car sprayed with the words 'f--- ICE'. The student told The Telegraph the protests 'hit close to home' because her father Jerry Flores, 39, who is originally from Guerrero in Mexico was detained by agents when she was at middle school. 'My grandma would probably not like me being out here... we're out here showing our support, doing the best we can do,' she said. On Monday, Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, condemned the ICE raids, claiming they had brought 'fear and terror' to the streets of Los Angeles and were to blame for the unrest. Yurien, 20, found out ICE agents were targeting her father Mario's work at Ambiance Apparel when he messaged her to tell her he was hiding. 'I said 'OK dad, I love you, don't make any noise… I told him I loved him again. He said 'me too, I love you guys…' and since then, I haven't had communication with him,' she told The Telegraph. Yurien, who did not want to give her last name, said she raced to the workplace in downtown Los Angeles and saw her father, who is from Mexico and has lived in the US for decades, being escorted to a van and driven away. 'I felt devastated, mad, angry... because there was nothing I could do to stop it,' she said, clutching a poster which read 'dad, come back home'. University student Montserrat Arrazola, 22, also saw her father being detained by ICE agents on Friday after she rushed to Ambiance Apparel when she saw the raid was happening on TikTok. Speaking to The Telegraph after a press conference outside the clothing manufacturer on Monday morning, she said: 'I felt powerless. I felt like I had my hands tied because I couldn't do anything.' She has managed to speak to her father, Jorge, who moved to the US from Mexico 'many years ago' on the phone once since then. He said he was okay. 'I have a lot of emotions running through me. I can't really explain,' she said, adding that she had not been to any of the protests that have broken out in response. Joanna Lopez, 17, discovered three of her uncles, who had all moved to the US from Mexico as teenagers, had been detained on Friday after she also saw it unfold on social media. 'I just feel for everybody whose families are being taken away right now,' she said. Ms Lopez, who attended the protest later that day, said she was 'very disappointed' in the people who had turned to violence and vandalism, adding that it portrays the scores of peaceful protesters in a bad light. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
I didn't think we were heading for civil war. Now I'm not so sure
I used to dismiss fears Britain was headed for open sectarian conflict, possibly even civil war, as overblown. Those expressing such unease were, I suspected, succumbing to their own subconscious cognitive bias and exaggerating the scale of the problem. After all, does the UK really have the ingredients for such internal strife? We live in an inefficient and messed up society, but not a 'failed' one. Taxes are paid, people who want to be are employed, we have abundant food, clothing and energy – at least until Ed Miliband's climate fanaticism catches up with us. We don't have America's gun problem, even if gang violence has become a feature of British life. We have, relative to other developed nations, successfully integrated migrants in large numbers. Now, however, I'm not so sure. The rule-abiding majority are nearing the end of their tether with illegal migration. They cannot tolerate the sheer lawlessness of it, how toddlers can be trampled to death in filthy dinghies only for the French authorities to wave the boats on their way. They are appalled when, on the rare occasion those piloting these boats are arrested, the jail time is just a few months. They are horrified that our shadow economy allows illegal migrants to work here, whilst their own taxes fund 'asylum' hotels at a cost of £5 million every day. And they are tired of being gaslit by our political class, who keenly downplay many of the problems associated with what they deceitfully term 'irregular' migration. Of being labelled as 'bigoted' for wondering if the scale and pace of change is compatible with assimilation and social cohesion. As the state loses control of our borders, with both legal and illegal in-flows reaching objectively unsustainable levels, it is going to ever more desperate lengths to keep the peace. So our officers throw a retired special constable into a police cell over a social media post, though not before sneering at his 'Brexity' bookshelves. Our authorities seem to think that rape gangs need to be covered up to protect 'community cohesion'. I write just days after The Telegraph revealed that concern over mass migration could be deemed a 'terrorist ideology' by the Prevent programme. Wish me luck. But all this just paints over the mould. If the white working-class feel they are constantly being expected to sacrifice their culture, identity, their freedom of speech in order to celebrate and preserve those of immigrants, it may not be long before they revolt. As Prof David Betz of King's College London warns, when 'a formerly dominant social majority fears it is losing that dominance' it doesn't surrender its position quietly. If you want to know how this plays out, glance at events unfolding in Northern Ireland and Los Angeles. Violence has erupted on the streets of Ballymena following the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by two 14-year old boys of Romanian descent. Riots have broken out across the city of angels in response to immigration enforcement operations. Some in the Donald Trump-hating media have dismissed the lawlessness as simply 'a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn'. California governor Gavin Newsom somehow blames not the mobs running amok, but rather 'deranged' and 'dictatorial' Trump for what is happening in LA. What we are witnessing in these conflagrations 5,000 miles apart are worrying signs of what could become much more serious confrontations in the future. On the one hand, 'natives' could turn increasingly hostile to migrants. On the other, large migrant communities, now established for two or three generations, could defend newcomers to whom they may be related or with whom they have more in common than with white Brits. To avoid the worst of this, white Brits and affluent migrants could leave cities to become dominated by poorer, more welfare-dependent migrant communities – deepening the rural and urban splits recent election results already tell us are emerging. In London, the White British population declined from 71 per cent in 1991 to 37 per cent in 2021. Birmingham has experienced similar ethnic change. Nigel Farage wants to empower enforcement officers to detain and deport on a regular schedule, using charter flights to get the job done. Yet when Police Scotland attempted to remove two Indian illegal migrants in 2021, protestors surrounded their van, with the men eventually released following a stand-off lasting several hours. If the Government tried something similar in Tower Hamlets, there would be large-scale rioting with the authorities again, eventually, backing down. Reform will need a clear view about who exactly they would try to deport, the size of the problem and the means to do it. Even then, they may not be able to deport more than a few thousand. The situation may seem almost intractable. But the solution cannot be to deny the problem exists. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.