Thursday January 15th 2026
Flytipping
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Catherine Hunter
Glaswegian communities are being urged to call out and name those guilty of fly-tipping in a bid to address the problem.
It comes as a document detailing the extent of fly-tipping in Glasgow revealed a total of 65,216 instances across the city between January 2024 and November 2025.
Glasgow City Council’s enforcement team has been trying to crack down on fly-tipping which is a criminal offence, with those caught facing a fixed penalty notice of £500.
If taken to court, perpetrators could be fined £40,000 or sent to prison for a maximum of five years.
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During Wednesday afternoon’s scrutiny committee council leader Susan Aitken said: “It is notoriously difficult and always has been to collect evidence around fly-tipping and who is responsible for it.
“I noticed that it has spread across the city which wasn’t always the case. In the past the FPNs (fixed penalty notices) were concentrated in the city centre.
“Most of the FPNs are [now] in Southside Central. Is that as a consequence of you targeting your enforcement resources where the highest number of reporting is?”
A council officer confirmed that they take the information available and use that data to inform deployment teams.
Councillor Eunis Jassemi said: “I have real frustration about this. The enormous ratio between the fly-tipping reports and the number of FPNs isn’t good enough for a city the size of ours, especially as we have the Commonwealth Games coming and other national events.
“How can we justify an enforcement rate of 0.6%? Is there a benchmark or quality of standard of the rate of enforcement in the city?”
The council officer said: “I acknowledge the difficulties of it and a lot of the time we cannot identify who has been fly-tipping and that means we don’t have the evidence.
“My call out is to the communities – you must know who is doing this. Please give us that information. We can take your statements and we can utilise that information.
“We can’t do this as an enforcement service on our own. We have eight officers employed to deal with fly-tipping throughout the city.
“It is a really challenging situation for me but when we have the intelligence we will send the staff out and we will deploy them in the hope that we get the evidence that is required to issue the fixed penalty and change people’s behaviour.”
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