JOHN CRAWFORD is a fellow of CIWM
John has served on the council from 1988-2009. He is also a fellow of the Royal institute of Scotland and served as President between 1991-92.
INDUSTRY INSIGHT Enforcing the legislation
WHEN I began training at Saltcoats Burgh in the late ‘60s, we were armed with the Public Health (Scotland) Act 1897.
Our English colleagues had the Public Health Act 1936, but we thought ours was quite nifty since Section 16 defi ned a nuisance as ‘… any premises in such a state... as to be a nuisance, injurious, or dangerous to health.’ We’d take our evidence to court and if the sheriff agreed it was a nuisance, we had a conviction. Most miscreants preferred to sort out the problem beforehand rather than take their chances before ‘the beak’ – as judges are referred to in less reverent circles.
As I got older, I tended to use whatever worked to resolve environmental problems.
Then the Control of Pollution Act (CoPA) 1974 arrived. I liked the bit about ‘... not being an off ence to deposit waste on land that wasn’t licensed if in emergency circumstances.’ After all, if the rubbish on your truck was on fi re, you needed to be able to jettison it without fear of being done for fl y-tipping. I was obviously a bit naïve, as this clause would be later used as a defence by an off ender who we prosecuted years later for illegally dumping several thousand tonnes of waste in a farmer’s fi eld.
The defendant’s barrister began by stating the farmer had dug a hole in his fi eld before realising it was very close to a stream - and if the bank burst it would overfl ow into nearby homes. To rectify this ‘emergency’, the defendant had been contracted to dump as much rubbish in the hole as they could fi nd so that the original line of the stream wasn’t compromised.
Until then I had suspected the sheriff had been half asleep but his ears pricked up when this nonsense was corroborated by an official from the
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River Purification Board. We got a conviction in the end, but it was clear the sheriff was tickled by the excuse offered by the Defence team, as the fine he levied did not amount to anything like the money they would rake off dumping the rubbish.
Another problem with environmental cases is that the court’s prosecutors do not have as much time to prepare for the trial as the defendants’ lawyers. Occasionally the Defence off ers a red herring excuse that the Prosecution isn’t able to rebut.
As I got older, I tended to use whatever worked to resolve environmental problems. We had a sheltered housing development where a bloke arrived every day at 4.00pm to visit his mother, bringing large bags of bird food that he scattered round the grassed areas. Several hundred pigeons and seagulls were waiting for him, their droppings messing up paving slabs, clothes on washing lines and cars, never mind the noise they created. He was quite adamant that we had no environmental powers to stop him doing it.
The 4.00pm timescale led me to wonder if he was a teacher but I discovered he was a private hire (PH) driver. As I also ran the council’s licensing service, I told their staff to warn him if he did not stop feeding the birds, I would haul him up before the licensing panel and recommend they cancel his PH driver’s licence since I felt his behaviour was not consistent with being a “fi t and proper person”. After a lot of blustering on his part – and an assurance that I was serious – the feeding stopped!
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