Environment Bill

Anne Marie Morris Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 28th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

I welcome this groundbreaking Bill on environmental issues. It takes us very many good steps forward. For me, one of the highlights is the governance provisions. The concept of the Office for Environmental Protection is an excellent one, as are the environmental improvement plans and the concept of target setting. Like other speakers, however, I have some concerns about the teeth that such bodies—particularly, the OEP—will have, because I have had experience of the ombudsman framework. It is long, tedious and, at the end of the day, often does not offer results. Judicial reviews are frankly too slow and tribunals are very slow. Damage to the environment can be quick and irreversible, so we need to look more closely at deterrence and speed. The introduction of fines is one small measure that will be very helpful.

The water abstraction and pollution provisions are equally welcome, but I have concerns that the Bill does not properly address water quality testing. The existing regime is not fit for purpose. In my own constituency, the Marine Management Organisation has offered a licence for dredging. The waste is to come from Exmouth harbour to Sprey point in Teignmouth. My concern is that the parties affected were not properly consulted—there is no statutory duty to consult—and that the concordat that is supposed to ensure they agree simply does not work. There is no joined-up action. We need proper statutory consultation and a process to get people working together.

The water quality standards, which are set by the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, were woefully inept at dealing with my problem. When measuring samples, it looked only at 1.5 metres in depth, but the dredging was to take place much deeper. Likewise, the extracts were not analysed; in fact, they contained clay and silt, not just gravel. The Government need to consider proper mechanisms to review the decisions of bodies such as CEFAS and the MMO, because, if they are left as they are, poor decisions will be made that, in my constituency, could impact tourism and beach quality. Natural England and the Environment Agency do not use even the powers they have. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 requires an environmental assessment —in my case, we have seahorses—but that has not happened. The EA did not look properly at some of the blue flag and other quality issues.

Air quality is also key. Two towns in my constituency are currently over the limit. Clearly, we need to measure more, so I am glad that we will be measuring more of the pollutants, but we need more clarity about how this will be delivered. We also need to recognise the importance of local authorities in providing support. Many, including mine in Teignbridge, want to be carbon neutral, but they need Government assistance. There needs to be a joined-up plan. Let us help them, and let us help local generation. Regen is trying to do this in the south-west, but the Government do not seem to be playing ball and allowing bodies such as fire stations and hospitals to benefit from having solar panels and so on. We need a clean air Bill.

So well done, Government. This is a groundbreaking start, but unless this action is joined up, we will not succeed. I also put in a final plea for young people to be involved. The previous Prime Minister established a group to properly review this, but it has never met, and many of my constituents from Torquay Grammar School have gone viral on YouTube because they want it to happen.

Fly-tipping

Anne Marie Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

This is a very interesting topic, and one that I raised with the Minister in my own debate not so long ago. It will come as no surprise to her that we will be covering many of the same points again.

For me, there is a clear difference between fly-tipping, litter louts and waste disposal sites. At one end of the scale we have the litter louts—those who drop litter out of car doors or who cannot be bothered to dispose of their cans and their plastics. At the other end of the scale we have properly managed and licensed sites for dealing with waste that will ultimately get recycled or sent to landfill. The fly-tipping piece is in the middle, and I believe that it needs to be separately recognised.

The Minister has done an excellent job of looking at how to tackle litter louts. This year she has increased on-the-spot fines and default penalties and has recently introduced a provision whereby those who chuck things out of their car windows can be held to account. I say all credit to her. With regard to waste sites, she has said that there should be provision to lock them and that rogue operators should be not only fined, but forced to clean up their own mess. I commend all of that, but I maintain that we still have a gap in understanding what we mean when considering fly-tipping.

[Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)]

Quite a lot of the litter that we see on the sides of our roads comes from commercial vehicles that have not necessarily deliberately fly-tipped; they might be items that were not properly secured on the vehicles. That is certainly the case in Dorset, and I daresay elsewhere across the country. Does my hon. Friend agree that is an additional category that should be looked at when we consider fly-tipping?

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne Marie Morris]

That is a very interesting point. That goes into the litter category, which the Minister has already begun to legislate on, and I would expand the category to cover that. In a sense, it is largely about intent. I think that littering is generally about being careless, which such a van owner would be, whereas fly-tipping is driven by economic gain. The formal sites are in a different category all of their own, as licensed operators. I urge the Minister to look at this more sensibly. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) has indicated, an important part of this is making the public aware.

A point about the responsibility and liability for those who create the waste was raised earlier. They are already liable and responsible under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. They are responsible for using those who dispose of waste in an appropriate and legal way. If they use an unlicensed organisation, they are responsible and can be fined. The problem is not that the legislation is not there; it is that it is incredibly hard to enforce.

With regard to raising awareness, there are some very simple things that could be done. First, every bin could have a label on it that says, “Be warned: unlicensed fly-tipping is illegal”—something catchy that makes people wake up to the fact that they are responsible and can be fined. There should be something making exactly the same point on every council tax bill that goes out. There are ways and means of doing this. If people realise that they can and will be fined, that will make a big difference.

For many of the cases in my constituency, the challenge has been evidence. Unless there is a photograph showing the dumping being done by a particular vehicle, the licence plate and the individual doing the dumping, it is hard to get a conviction. We should look at the evidence test, because perfection can be the enemy of the good. There are clear guidelines for holding people responsible that we cannot move beyond, but we must review the evidence that is required and look at what is reasonable in these circumstances to enable a conviction.

The agencies involved include the DVLA, which has been mentioned. The challenge is that the DVLA uses data protection to withhold information about the vehicle owner, as has happened to a number of my constituents. When I challenged the DVLA, it said, “Oh no, we normally give evidence in those circumstances,” but that is not the case. The Government should look at the stakeholders involved and at what we can do to enable such evidence as is available to be used.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady is making some excellent suggestions. A constituent came to see me at my surgery this Saturday to report commercial fly-tipping in Eccup—a small village on the outskirts of my constituency. He said that large commercial vehicles are dumping waste and suggested a national CCTV programme in hot spots to catch the evidence. I think CCTV is part of the solution to fly-tipping.

[Anne Marie Morris]

It is a very expensive solution. If we could do what the hon. Gentleman describes at a reasonable cost, that would be wonderful. He makes a good point, but in the countryside the cost of putting CCTV cameras around every single location would be extremely high, and making them impossible to dismantle would be a real challenge. It is a great idea for cities, where they can be put in inaccessible places, but the challenges in rural areas mean that it is not a viable solution.

The Minister should also review the licensing scheme. At the moment there is a grey area: it is unclear who has to be licensed and who does not. The Minister ought to look at increasing the number of bodies that are required to have licences. It should not just be those disposing of a certain quantity or type of waste; we should require any vehicle capable of disposing of waste to have some sort of licence.

There is also an issue relating to tracing the vehicle and the material being dumped. Currently we use tachometers and a number of other things to track commercial vehicles. It seems to me that if we issue a licence to a vehicle, we should include something to record where they have gone in a central system, so that when there is tipping we can check the recording. Nowadays, screwing metal barcodes to white goods is pretty common, so there must be a way of tracing the origin of white goods that are dumped. We should look at that for the future. Perhaps we should do what we do with cans and bottles: people should get their money back if they take their white goods to the tip.

One of the problems for most farmers is that insurance is prohibitively expensive. At the moment, something like 17% of farmers are insured, and the rest are not. The consequence is that the clear-up of fly-tipping is extremely costly. It seems to me that the insurance companies have a part to play in resolving that problem and making insurance much more achievable.

I have given the Minister a couple more ideas since the last time I spoke on this matter, for the residents of Devon and Teignbridge, in particular. I would very much like her to look at creating a new strategy specifically for fly-tipping, rather than for litter louts, which I think she has a done a grand job of dealing with, and formal waste disposal sites.

UK Fisheries Policy

Anne Marie Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

I will try to be as brief as my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid), Mr Paisley.

As I have said, any management system must have buy-in from the industry and must also be flexible enough to allow for massive fluctuations in stocks, such as the massive fluctuation in the bass stocks that we saw in the south-west this year. At the end of the day, fishermen cannot tell what is swimming into their net. They capture bass. If they cannot land the fish, they get discarded on the sea bed, dead, and that does not help anybody, particularly with the conservation of fish stocks. The system must also be able to accommodate mixed-species capture in a mixed fishery, such as we have in the south-west, to allow utilisation on board boats of all stocks that are kept and also to meet our obligations under article 62 of the United Nations convention on the law of the sea. We should utilise the maximum amount of scientifically approved stocks for the benefit of the United Kingdom fleet.

We joined the European Union at a time when I was connected to the industry, and I look to the Minister to provide me and the United Kingdom’s fisheries with the assurance that we shall not sacrifice access to resources to buy access to a market, which is what happened at that time. We have to put right the wrong that took place. I want the Minister to provide me with that assurance, as well as the assurance that on 29 March 2019 we shall leave the common fisheries policy. I fully accept the possibility that we will have to allow an implementation period. We owe that not only to British fishermen but to our European partners.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the London agreement provisions must be included as well, and they must not hang over?

[Mrs Murray]

As I understand it, we are leaving the London convention of 1964 as well.

Will the Minister confirm today that, even with an implementation period, we shall leave the common fisheries policy on 29 March 2019, and that access to resources will not be sacrificed to buy access to the market?

Fly-tipping in Rural Areas

Anne Marie Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 21st November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Ind)]

Fly-tipping is a very serious issue in my rural Devon constituency. I am pleased to see that so many Members, some of whom may wish to intervene during my speech, are still in the Chamber. That clearly shows that this is not just a topic for Devon, but applies to all the beautiful parts of the countryside where there is the blight of tipping.

What is fly-tipping? It is the illegal disposal of household, industrial, commercial or controlled waste. The challenge is that it is difficult to find any specific legislation that deals with the problem. If we look at the continuum of waste disposal in our beautiful countryside, we see at one end what I would describe as the litter louts who cannot be bothered to put their Coke tins in a bin, and at the other end formal waste disposal, with properly regulated sites and a compliance formula. Fly-tipping comes somewhere in the middle. Individuals are involved, but in this instance it is not the odd Coke bottle but a large item such as a fridge. Those people do not want to pay the tip charge, so what do they do? They stick the item in the back of the car or in a van, and dump it in a country lane.

Then there is the activity that is closer to the formal waste disposal end. Gangs, or criminals, think, “We can make some money out of this. Households do not want to go to the trouble of getting rid of their own waste, so we, for a fee—and we will not tell them that we will not be paying the tip fee—will take that rubbish and dump it in a lane.”

I was pleased to read the Government’s recently published litter strategy, but I must add that fly-tipping takes up only one page of it. We need to pay a lot more attention to the grey area between the litter issue and the properly legislated waste disposal issue, because this is a blight on our environment. It is a source of pollution, a danger to public health and a hazard to wildlife, and the bad news is that it is increasing. In English local authorities, 1 million cases were reported last year, which represents a 7% increase on the year before—and remember, those are just the cases that are reported. Many more go unreported, so I suspect that the number is in fact much more significant. The cost of the clear-up has also risen steeply. In the past year, it was £58 million; in the previous year, it was £15 million.

[Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is right to say that this does not just affect her constituents in Devon; it also affects mine in Dorset and doubtless those of many other Members. The cost falls not only on local authorities but often on landowners and farmers. Does she agree that, although the Government have taken some positive steps, we need to look closely to see how the burden can be fairly distributed, because this is not the fault of those landowners and farmers?

[Anne Marie Morris]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Central Government and local authorities are effectively contributing to the cost—there is a contribution from the taxpayer through central Government—but there is a burden on individual landowners and a requirement for them to clear up the land, and they get absolutely no contribution towards doing that. This is absolutely something that we need to look at because, as he says, it is not fair. What we want is, in the Government’s words, for the polluter to pay. It seems to me that the victims are paying, not the polluters. Fly-tipping is definitely on the increase. Most of it involves household waste, and to be fair, most of it is tipped on the highway, but an increasing amount is tipped on farmland and in woodland.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way; I have sought her permission to intervene on her. The role of local councils is an important one, and it is positive when they encourage people to recycle. Does she agree that they must always ensure that there is an avenue for people to dispose of their waste in recycling centres, because if there is not, they may be tempted to do something illegal, if only because it is handy to do so?

[Anne Marie Morris]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. There is a real challenge to incentivise people in this regard, and we need to use carrots rather than sticks to ensure that they dispose of their waste carefully and responsibly.

Clearly, we should recognise the environmental damage that waste causes. It is absolutely right that we as a country have taken on board the European waste framework directive, which led to our Environmental Protection Act 1990. The legislation rightly dictated that we should reduce landfill and increase recycling, but there is a cost to that. The challenge is to determine who should bear that cost.

[Chris Davies (Brecon and Radnorshire) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing forward this important Adjournment debate. Sadly, my beautiful constituency was blighted when the local authority decided, for cost-cutting reasons, to close the local tip for four days each week. That resulted in a much greater cost to the local authority, through having to clean up the area afterwards. We are hoping that the national Government will take this issue further, but the local authorities also have a great role to play.

[Anne Marie Morris]

My hon. Friend makes a sound point. I am sad to hear that this is happening not just in my constituency, but I am not surprised. He is right to say that shutting the tip has placed a much greater burden of cost on the local authority than simply keeping it open.

The overall responsibility for these matters lies with the Environment Agency. The question of who has to take action to clear up the mess and sort out the licensing is split between the Environment Agency, the local authority and, in regard to removing rubbish, private landowners.

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

My beautiful constituency in Suffolk illustrates the fact that this problem exists across the country. We have had 658 incidents in my constituency in the past year, and the nub of the problem is that we need to catch those who dump. I have been talking to a constituent, Richard Vass of Burland Boxes, about how we can use innovation to target fly-tippers and capture their number plates in order to allow prosecutions to be brought. That would create an income stream, without which somebody else has to pay.

[Anne Marie Morris]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The challenge is not just to collect the data. A constituent of mine with a large estate regularly finds that people have been fly-tipping on it. Once, while sorting through the rubbish, he found a receipt from a fast food drive-through that included a date and time stamp. He and the local police managed to find the vehicle registration number, but when they went to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency they were told that it could not release the name because of data protection. There has to be a way of using the evidence that we can get, because we cannot rely solely on catching the villains in the act, which is extraordinarily difficult, particularly in rural areas. Installing cameras everywhere would be prohibitively expensive, impractical and completely unrealistic. There has to be a better way of dealing with the evidence trail. My hon. Friend makes a sound point.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is really good that we are having this debate. It is not only about catching the perpetrators, either through the local authority or the Environment Agency; it is also about making sure that they are prosecuted and that the fines are very heavy. Otherwise, it is worth their while tipping the waste and saving the money, rather than taking it to a waste disposal site; if they are caught and fined, the figure is so small that they can carry on doing it. We really need to catch them and make the penalty a deterrent, because at the moment it is not.

[Anne Marie Morris]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I believe that 0.1% of fly-tippers are prosecuted, and the average penalty is a £400 fine. There is absolutely no disincentive, so why would they stop fly-tipping? That has to change.

What can we do to make the system work better? If tips just charge more, or indeed shut for four days a week, clearly that just makes the problem worse. If we do not extend opening hours, all we are doing is discouraging good citizens and good builders from disposing of their rubbish responsibly at the end of the working day.

I think that increasingly councils are trying to do this for less and less money. The consequence is that they have no incentive to extend their opening hours or reduce the cost. My local authority has recently started charging for the disposal of green waste, and the consequence has been a huge increase in fly-tipping of green waste. Indeed, in Teignbridge fly-tipping has gone up by 60% in five years, and the increase correlates with the introduction of additional charges, when there is a spike in the number of fly-tipping incidents.

Another thing that local authorities have done to try to constrain their costs is to say, “We will deal only with waste that is produced by people living in our borough or ward.” The consequence is that people are now turned away from their nearest tip. Realistically, if the Government want to encourage people to recycle and to be responsible for their waste, they need to make that easier. In the neighbouring constituency of Torbay there is a sign at the tip stating, “You have to provide evidence that you actually live in this part of Devon before you can dispose of your waste here.” We are never going to solve the problem that way.

It seems to me that we have effectively incentivised the individual householder to fly-tip, or to employ a third party to fly-tip for them, and we have incentivised the man with a van who might do furniture removals and so on to offer tip services, but then he does not get a licence and instead dumps on highways, woodland and farmland. It just does not work.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) mentioned, the penalties, even if they are imposed, are woefully low. In the magistrates court someone can get 12 months and a £50,000 fine, but I am not aware that anyone has had either of those penalties. In the Crown court they can get up to five years and an unlimited fine, but again I am not aware—perhaps the Minister is—that anyone has received those sorts of punishments. It really is a problem, and the evidence problem is probably one of the biggest challenges.

Ultimately, the Government have said that the polluter must pay, but based on everything that I have seen and everything that my colleagues have said, the polluter currently does not pay, so let us look at things in a little more detail. Who is the polluter? At one extreme, one could say that it is the owner of the rubbish. Under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, the owner has a duty of care to check that the individual to whom the rubbish is given for disposal is properly registered. I do not suppose that most people know that, that they check or that they would even know where to check. They probably also do not know when people have to be licensed, which is far from clear.

I went on the Environment Agency website, and most of the legislation and registration information was about disposal sites. There was little about the movement of waste, unless it is stored or controlled, so that might be an area to look into, or maybe I just do not have enough experience of the regulations and the Minister will be able to set me right. However, it seems as though it is quite difficult for householders to comply with that duty of care—they do not know about it and they do not know where to go to find the information. Section 33 of the 1990 Act contains a similar duty for controlled waste, and I suspect that most households are more conscious of how to dispose of fridges, batteries and electrical equipment, but there are no specific penalties or punishments. Perhaps the Minister can set me right, but I am unaware of any owner who has been on the wrong side of the law for having given a third party rubbish that has subsequently been dumped.

As for the middlemen—the man or woman with a van—for them it is a question of whether they need a licence. Most of them probably do, because they probably do store the waste somewhere along the line, but few in the business can be bothered and that leads to criminal activity. They know that the chances of getting caught or going to prison are small, so they do not bother, and they get paid when the rubbish is handed over, not when it is delivered to the tip, so where is the incentive? To fix what is wrong with the system, we need to increase the carrot and increase the stick, and we need to be clear about what fly-tipping is and not just lump it with litter or managed waste disposal, because it lies somewhere in between and is something that my constituents and many others are getting exercised about. It damages our countryside and our tourism, and it is a blight on our society.

The Government are right that one of the obvious first steps is to ensure that education is in place so that our children grow up knowing what they should and should not do. That is fine, but there are many people beyond the age of 18 who do not know that, so how are we going to get to them? That is another question for the Government. We then need to look at how to incentivise legal tipping. We must review whether we should completely remove tip charges. When they are set against the clear-up costs and the amount received in fees, we can start to see whether there is a balance. Perhaps the Minister has some ideas about that. It must also be right to extend tip opening times, because people work. We need to recognise that both mum and dad are usually working, so that means we have to allow tipping when they are not working. If people are prepared to come and dispose of waste legally, we need to enable sites to take waste from wherever it comes, which is not always the case.

We also need to consider the individuals who are the potential polluters. We need to extend the rubbish owner’s accountability. They ought to be required to ask for and see someone’s licence, and they should not pay for the rubbish to be taken away until they get some stamped receipt from the tip to say that it has actually been disposed of. The idea of trying to track waste is a good one, and we could track white goods with today’s technology; there must be barcoding, chipping systems or some means by which to do that. When we do find evidence that makes clear from which home the fly-tipped rubbish came, there should be a mechanism to trace it back to ask the householder whether they have disposed of any rubbish and who they used to do so.

Then there is the carrier, licensed or not—the man or woman with a van. How will we extend their accountability? Because of the challenges in securing a successful prosecution, the number of prosecutions has actually gone down 25% in the past year. What might we do? Maybe we could require some record keeping. At one level, a registered and licensed carrier has to keep records, but we could extend that by requiring tachographs and GPS systems. We should review again the penalties and fines, whether there are custodial sentences and at what level, and whether we should seize assets.

There is provision in some cases to seize the vehicle, which is obviously a good thing because it stops the practice continuing. If the vehicle is crushed, it clearly stops the fly-tipping completely. But there are other assets that we might consider seizing to increase the disincentive. If no fine is paid, there is also the threat of credit reference agency records. If non-payments were logged on those records, it would clearly be a black mark, and most people do not want their credit reference in any way negatively affected. We might also consider lifetime bans for anyone who is found to be undertaking such activity without a licence.

There are a number of issues. We need to consider better interagency working. It would certainly help if the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency were prepared to work with local authorities to identify the cars, drivers and owners—having an evidence trail is very important.

I turn now to the victims. Landowners are stuck. Two thirds of farmers have reported fly-tipping of one sort or another and, under section 59 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, they can be required by the local authority or the Environment Agency to clear up 100% of the mess, but they are not the polluters.

It is impossible to prevent fly-tipping cost-effectively. My local community has tried by digging ditches around carparks and by putting up fences and cameras, but the cameras get smashed by the fly-tippers. It is very difficult. Only 13% of farmers and landowners tend to insure, so very few of them are covered.

Insurance is expensive and fly-tipping is hard to prevent, so we need to consider how we can support landowners, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) said, because they do us a great service by keeping our land beautiful and fit for tourism. How can we share the costs with the local authority? How could we subsidise the landowners’ insurance? How could we allow the disposal, free of charge, of anything that has been dumped on-site?

Will the Minister consider making sure that the polluter pays, that waste can be tracked, that it is easier to dispose legally and that householders think before they dump so that we can preserve our wonderful countryside? I thank her for her attention to this real issue.