Chip

An office worker says he will not pay a £75 fine for dropping a cigarette end in Llanelli town centre.
Andrew Stevenson is the first person in Carmarthenshire to receive such an on-the-spot ticket for littering.

After puffing away outside his non- smoking office he dropped the butt and was given a fixed penalty.

The county council says there had a problem with discarded cigarettes in the area but says officers use their discretion when issuing fines

Mr Stevenson, 20, told BBC News Online he was arriving for work at a call centre on Tuesday morning and dropped the cigarette on the floor before stamping on it to put it out.

"Our company does provide an ashtray, which is on the wall, but the public use it as a bin and it is always full of papers," he added.

"As I was going inside, two council officers asked if they could have a word and showed me their council badges.

"They then read me my rights for some stupid reason and took my information off me.

"They then gave me a slip and a £75 fine. I'm not going to pay it - it is not right. "Ninety-nine percent of people would chuck them on the floor.

Agree with the council on this one.*** ends are thrown everywhere especially at traffic lights etc.

Chip.

CrisPDuk

About fecking time The fact that the dirty lazy ******* think that the world is their ashtray is the thing about smokers that irritates me most.

I hope now they are going to start doing the same thing with the dirty ***** who spit chewing gum out all over the place too

Iwan

Glad to hear councils are starting to take it seriously. It's a minging thing to do as it's rubbish like any other (coke cans, crisp packets). They think that because a *** end is small then it doesn't matter.

Redkop

TBH I agree with it, but find it a bit steep that the fine is £75 for one little *** end and is only £50 for dogs fouling in public places. Something amiss there....

Hammy Hamster

That is not correct. Carmarthenshire issue £75 fixed penalty notices for both littering and dog fouling.

Littering is littering, no matter what the item might happen to be.

Littering is a violation inder the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and dog fouling is a violation under the Dogs (Fouling of Land) Act 1996.

ProperCharlie

i find smokers unbeleivable in the way they just chuck their ash and butts everywhere. even after a bbq in my garden, place was covered in *** ends afterwards. trouble is, many smokers just don't see anything worng with it.

roll on fines, i say.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

A local pub landlord (free house - he owned the place) made the habit of kicking out anyone caught dropping their *** ends and putting them out with their feet on the carpet!

It was amusing to see - as half the time the people who did it didn't realise what they had done

The national motorcycle museam was burnt down due to a discarded *** end - I can't forgive the smoker who did that

unclebuck

Should be 750.

"An office worker says he will not pay a £75 fine"

See you in jail then.

logiclee

It's in the paper today that smoking is now banned in US jails, following the ban on smoking in workplaces. After a few weeks of high tension things are now calming down.

If he doesn't pay the fine perhaps they should send him there.

Cheers
Lee

imlach

I can't find it right now, but *** butts are not just the "paper & natural fibre" that people think they are.

They contain nasty plastic as well, which does not bio-degrade, and also birds etc tend to eat them, causing death in some instances.

There's simply no excuse. We've had this thread before about throwing *** butts out of car windows, and the usual vocal majority on Scoobynet could see nothing wrong with this behaviour........most because "it's hardly going to cause a problem - it's really small, and it'll biodegrade".

Well, it won't biodegrade, and if you add up all the discarded *** butts, it's a hell of a lot of litter.

imlach

Oh, and for those that discard *** butts as litter - do you also drop crisp bags, juice cans, other rubbish on the street?

If not, why not?

jjones

love the "i'm not going to pay it" attitude.

what a ****.

hope gets sent down for a few months and big bubba re-educates him.

ScoobyJawa

Fecking annoys me this. Outside our work canteen we have a load of picnic tables - they get surrounded in *** ends and it looks/is just plain nasty.

The irritating thing? The lazy smoking t0ssers walk past the bloody wall mounted ashtrays on the way back into the building FFS.

Kevin Mc

The council are wrong - they should be fining far more than £75

gsm1

Used to have a neighbour who went into his garden to smoke and then chucked his butts over into our garden. Nice bloke.

Turbohot

Very pleased to know about this "fine" business.
Its a disgusting habit dropping cigarette butts everywhere anyway.

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Now all we need is a £1000 fine for the ****ers who leave chewing gum everywhere...


M

Leslie

As well as chewing gum, its about time that the filthy habit of spitting all over the place was eradicated too. They stopped it in Singapore and very successfully too. Its a disgusting way to behave, done purely to imitate footballers who should know better. It is likely to spread disease too of course.

Les

Chip

Nearly everey time you see a footballer on the telly he's gobbing on the pitch. Maybe that's why the players slide about so much.

chip.