Speaking during an Assembly Environment Committee meeting this month, the SDLP's John Dallat has said that there are no figures available for the collection of fines for illegal waste in Northern Ireland.
The Northern Ireland court service collects information on the number and amounts of unpaid fines, and figures provided to the Committee showed that there were about 37,000 fine warrants relating to 22,000 defendants. A fine warrant is issued if someone does not pay a court imposed fine.
Committee chairperson SDLP's Dolores Kelly said members would be surprised to learn the information "does not stipulate the offences that these fines relate to." Mr Dallat told the Committee he found it "an astonishing revelation" that figures relating to the environment and "how those who destroy their environment are dealt with" were not available. He said, "I do know that one of those fines was for £5,000 and it was for polluting a large stretch of river which wiped out fish for probably years to come. I hope that the court service will revise how the statistics are held on file so the Committee have some indication of what was happening."
The court service provided details of a six month pilot project to determine the effectiveness of pursuing unpaid fines prior to the issue of warrants to the police for enforcement.
