A MAN is today on the run from a potential prison sentence for evading fees at a council dump.

For months, Simon James Foster, 36, repeatedly took vehicles loaded with large items of rubbish to the household waste centre in Hazel Court, York, and each time claimed they were from his home, Victoria Waudby, prosecuting, told York magistrates.

Sometimes he made more than one visit a day – and because he claimed each time he was acting as a householder, he didn’t pay any fees.

But he was operating a commercial business getting paid for collecting other people’s rubbish – and should have paid a commercial fee each time he left rubbish at the council-run dump.

Foster, of Pottery Lane, off Malton Road, York, denied eight charges of fraud by false representation, one of running a waste disposal business without a licence and one of failure to disclose what he did with waste.

He did not attend his trial and was convicted in his absence of all 10 charges.

York magistrates issued a warrant for his arrest and said they were considering passing a prison sentence because the offences had happened over a long period.

Reading out prosecution witness statements, Mrs Waudby, prosecuting for City of York Council, said it had to pay fees for putting items in landfill sites, or pay to have them transported to the new Allerton incinerator near the A1.

From June 16, 2017, to November 15, 2017, dump workers saw Foster using three vehicles to bring rubbish including sofas, carpets, toilet seats, bed frame, waste insulation material, wood, filled black bags and other waste to the dump. On each occasion when they challenged him, he filled in a form declaring the load was household waste from his own home.

But when they interviewed him, he confessed to taking money from other people to collect their unwanted items.

According to the witness statements, Foster and his co-tenant were officially warned about the state of their property in mid-2017 because they dumped burnt-out armchairs and other large items of rubbish in it.

When officers visited his home, they could not find any sign of renovation or DIY work that could have generated the loads dumped at Hazel Court.