THE owner of a skip hire firm is considering an appeal after being landed with a £10,000 fine for

failing to comply with waste

management conditions.

John Brotherton, owner of Brotherton Skip Hire at Ellar Ghyll Mill, Menston, was fined £10,000 with £3,467 costs by the Pudsey bench sitting at Leeds Magistrates Court.

Brotherton, of Throstle Nest Close, Otley, admitted six offences relating to breached conditions on his waste management licence.

He also admitted knowingly permitting the deposit of

controlled waste after the waste management licence for his site had been suspended by the Environment Agency.

Brotherton, speaking after the court case, told the Observer he was considering an appeal and blamed the unusually wet

weather in 1998 for the breaching of conditions at the site.

He claimed he had spent £500,000 on machinery at the site but that continually wet weather had meant waste could not be recycled and moved on.

"In 1998 there was only two weeks of good weather to clear the site. I spent half a million pounds on machinery but

couldn't use it. I wouldn't have cared if I was fly-tipping but I wasn't it is a licensed site," said Mr Brotherton.

At last Thursday's court,

magistrates heard that during several routine inspections of the site by agency officers in 1997 and 1998 Brotherton was found to be consistently breaching his waste management licence.

Offences included exceeding the site's permitted waste storage capacity and the improper storage of waste.

A compliance notice was served on July 1993 which detailed 13 waste management licence

conditions in breach and gave notice of time scales in which the required work needed to be

carried out.

Brotherton failed to comply with the notice and in September 1998 the Environment Agency served a suspension notice

prohibiting him from accepting or depositing waste at the site.

But waste continued to be both accepted and deposited at the site and last month Brotherton was charged with six offences brought under the Environment Protection Act 1990.

Ian Rowe, agency environment protection officer, said: "This case demonstrates that the agency will not tolerate poor standards of waste management and will seek to enforce the terms of waste management licences in order to prevent pollution of the

environment or harm to human health.

"The sentence handed out by the magistrates demonstrates the seriousness of ignoring

environmental legislation and the agency hopes that this case will raise the profile of the need to

prevent pollution and operate in accordance with waste management licences at licensed waste facilities."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.