A SKIP hire firm has been fined £7,000 and ordered to pay £2,900 court costs after oper-ating an illegal dump.

More than 300 tonnes of waste were stored at the Kenyon Street home of AWR Rent-A-Skip, in Ramsbottom, prompting complaints from neighbours, magistrates were told.

Bosses at the firm, based in Waterside and Peel Bridge Mills, admitted they had no permission to run a waste store, pleading guilty to enviromental protection offences Environment Agency inve-stigators visited the site last year after receiving a number of complaints.

The company had used a warehouse to store skip waste which it had collected in the course of its business.

There were around 300 tonnes of waste stored in the skips, both inside and outside the warehouse, but the company did not have an environmental permit for storing waste at this site.

Despite agreeing to rem-ove the waste from the site, the company continued to use the warehouse, in full knowledge that it was acting illegally, the court heard.

An enforcement notice was issued by the agency, but this was not complied with in the first instance, leading to the prosecution.

Gordon Whitaker, an agency environment man-ager, said: “In order to protect the environment and ensure the correct disposal of waste, companies handling, depositing and storing waste must have in place an environmental permit. By not complying with regulations, comp-anies are acting illegally.

“They risk damaging the local environment, and are undercutting legitimate bus-inesses.”

Following the case, the firm has applied for an environmental licence.

The company also applied to Bury council for retros-pective planning permission for the waste transfer stations at the mills.

Objections were raised by 14 neighbours, but the proposals were ratified by the borough’s planning commitee last March.