“Big Brother might be watching you.”

That’s the warning to fly-tippers as councillors credit newly installed mobile CCTV cameras with helping to clean up the district.

As the problem spiked last year, bosses at the local authority took a series of measures to eradicate it.

Signs were placed at fly-tipping hotspots – such as lay-bys – warning anyone tempted to dump their rubbish that they could be caught on film.

Eight small mobile cameras, costing several hundred pounds, were also purchased by the city council and positioned in inconspicuous locations near the most-hit areas to catch people in the act.

“People have got to know that in litter hotspots, we will put cameras out to try to detect offenders,” said Gorrell councillor Ashley Clark.

“Big Brother might be watching you. If we catch these people and send them to prison – because that’s where they should go – then that’s better still.

“It’s an offence against all of us and there’s absolutely no justification for this. It’s cowardly activity and we are determined to stamp it out.”

Cllr Clark, Cllr Robert Jones, Cllr Terry Westgate and Cllr Ben Fitter-Harding are the litter liaison officers for Whitstable, Herne Bay, Canterbury and the rural areas respectively.

When they receive a report of fly-tipping in their area, they alert council enforcement officers who check the camera’s footage – if one has been placed there – or look for other types of evidence for potential prosecution.

Cllr Jones, who says his ward of Herne and Broomfield has four hotspots, believes the number of cases has tumbled over the past eight months.

“It’s got to the point where the notices are powerful enough to deter people from doing it because they don’t know whether a camera’s there,” he said.

“They’re hidden, they’re mobile and are moved around from time to time.

“Lay-bys and pull-ins in places like Hicks Forstal Road and Curtis Wood Road were the spots in my ward where people dumped their rubbish. Every month there was litter in one of them.

“After we put the signs up and monitored the areas, those sites, barring one, haven’t been hit by fly-tippers.”

In addition to the eight mobile cameras, there are six fixed ones dotted around the district.

Cllr Jones said issues with hundreds of tonnes of rubbish being dumped at the former Share and Coulter pub in Greenhill last year prompted the council to take action.

“It became a dumping ground,” he said. “That was the catalyst for the city council to step in and try to stop it.

“Over the last year, the council has employed more officers.

“Fortunately in the last six to eight months, while things haven’t gone away, it’s improved. The system is working.”

Council spokesman Rob Davies said the primary purpose of the cameras is to act as a “deterrent and secondly to gather evidence where a crime has been committed”.

“The smaller mobile cameras were more recently acquired and are useful in that they are versatile and comparatively inexpensive,” he added.

“As one of several tools in the fight against fly-tipping, they are of use to us and we will continue to deploy them whenever we consider it necessary, in order to keep the district looking its very best.”

Mr Davies says it is “hard to quantify” the number of incidents the cameras have prevented and captured.