Swansea Council has fined three dog owners for fouling in three years, £75 each, and has never taken anyone to court for it, its own figures show.
It has never sent out a patrol to catch them either, the council says. Fines depend on tip-offs and on an officer seeing the dog in the act.
The numbers were given to councillors Sam Bennett, Mary Jones and Lynda James, who asked for three years of fines and prosecutions for dog fouling and fly-tipping side by side. They can press the cabinet member on them at Thursday evening’s full council meeting.
Cllr Cyril Anderson, the cabinet member for community services, said dog fouling was “taken very seriously”, but a fine can only be issued when an officer spots it “there and then”. The council “has never had a patrol based service”, he wrote, and enforcement “is done completely on intelligence”.
The three fines were issued in August 2024, May 2025 and this September, and all three were paid, according to the answer.
Fly-tipping: 8,727 dumps, 82 fines, six prosecutions
The fly-tipping half of the answer runs to bigger numbers. Since April 2023 the council has logged 8,727 reports of dumped rubbish, 2,442 of them last year and 1,353 already since April.
Over that period it issued 82 fixed penalties and brought six prosecutions, one of which is awaiting trial; prosecutions follow when a fine goes unpaid, the answer says. Across the three and a half years, that is one fine for every 106 dumps reported.
Cllr Anderson said he wanted to be sure the council was “taking all the action we can to deal with this blight”, and had asked officers how many dumps came with evidence that could be acted on, and how many of those led to action.
He has also told officers to draw up a business case for cameras at the city’s fly-tipping hotspots, “to demonstrate that we aren’t going to tolerate this”. “If we don’t have evidence directly then we need to think of more innovative ways to deal with this important issue,” he said.
Seven in ten of Swansea’s fly-tips are household waste, on Welsh Government figures we reported in September: black bags, broken furniture and the like. The same government paper says that if you pay someone to take your rubbish away and it ends up dumped, the law makes it your problem.
Next door, they crush the vans
Neath Port Talbot Council takes a harder line on both offences. It crushes fly-tippers’ vans, and in 2023 it took a Banwen woman to court when she did not pay a dog fouling fine; she ended up paying £387.52.
Welsh ministers have asked whether the top on-the-spot fine for fly-tipping should rise from £400 to £5,000, after councils told them £400 can be cheaper than paying to dispose of the rubbish legally. That consultation closed on 14 October and no decision has been announced.
The council has not said when the camera business case will come back to councillors, or where the hotspots are.
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