No ifs no butts: why smokers – and non smokers – are being hit with huge fines

Ella took the final drag of her cigarette outside the Rat and Pigeon pub, dropped it down on the ground, stamped on it, and bent over to pick it up. She usually stubbed her finished cigs against her trainers, before placing them in a bin, but she had heels on and didn’t want to ruin them.

A man, dressed in all black, wearing a jacket with Manchester City Council sewn on it and a camera mounted on his chest, appeared from behind the dustbins on Back Piccadilly, a grubby alley in the Northern Quarter. He said he was going to fine her for dropping litter. But Ella – one half of the writing team of this piece – had the cigarette in her hand, and was about to take it to a bin. 

After 20 minutes of threats of court action, various offers to walk to a bin with the man and several requests to see the footage of the offence, Ella conceded and handed him her details. She didn’t want the risk of court costs. She was £120 down before the night out had even started.

In recent years, Manchester City Council has taken on the litterbugs of our city by outsourcing environmental action to a private organisation: Waste Investigations Support & Enforcement (WISE). Their environmental enforcement officers patrol the city, with the remit of dishing out fines to anyone they witness dropping litter. The bodycams they wear are turned on at the point of interaction with the litterer, and they are permitted to use their discretion to determine when an offence is committed.

I’ve spoken with several people who feel they were followed or observed while smoking cigarettes by these officers. I’ve also spoken to others, like Ella, who say they didn’t drop the litter at all — and some who told me they were fined for dropping cigarettes when they don’t even smoke. One chap wasn’t even in the country at the time of his supposed offence.

The WISE officers are there to pick up on all forms of littering, but their efforts seem to be hyper-focused on cigarette butts. One councillor in Northern Ireland told me that his council even "got rid of" WISE after more than two-thirds of fines were for cigarette butt litter, and claimed their officers were patrolling private car parks rather than public streets.

WISE doesn't respond to my emails, and Manchester City Council said it’s “committed to ensuring that littering, including the discarding of cigarette butts, is tackled effectively,” but refuses to answer how the fine money collected is split between the council and WISE. However, an FOI by the Big Issue in 2023 revealed that 25% of fine money was kept by the council, the other 75% remaining with its previous environmental enforcement supplier 3GS.

So we have a litter problem, a private company brought in to stop all rubbish-chucking in the city, and a bunch of people fined predominantly for dropping, and not dropping, cigarettes. Is our city actually getting any cleaner? And what on earth is going on?

Hello! It's Alec, the rubbish writer. As in, the guy who writes about rubbish for the Mill.

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