Environment Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Viscount Ridley

Committee stage
Wednesday 30th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, on this amendment and thank her very much for her contribution. I also declare my interest as a landowner in Northumberland. I am not here to carp about the cost to me of doing this, more to carp about the inconvenience of finding your gateways blocked again and again, as well as the unpleasantness of this problem. It is often a really unpleasant thing to have to deal with.

Fly-tipping is a huge problem. It has got worse during the pandemic because a lot of local authorities closed their tips when there was social distancing of various kinds. The fly-tipping industry—if we can call it that—seems to have a sort of momentum behind it now, so even though those tips are open, it continues. On my farm, we experience this problem about once a week, to give you an idea of how bad it is. There is usually a chunk of leylandii hedge, a fridge, a cooker, some flooring, bits of clothing, toys, random chunks of concrete, lots of plastic, plenty of polystyrene packaging and some really unmentionable things as well.

If you are lucky, there is also a bank statement or a utility bill and this can be very helpful. However, when you go round and knock on the door of the person whose bank statement it is, they apologise profusely and, as the noble Baroness said, say, “I’m terribly sorry, we thought they were a legitimate waste disposal outfit”. That is, again and again, the problem that one encounters. There are plenty of rogues masquerading as legitimate waste disposal people. Surely it is possible to tackle that problem.

In our case, many of the tips are—because we keep our gates firmly locked—on the public highway side of the gate and they end up being the local authority’s problem to get rid of, not ours. All it takes is a couple of calls and a lot of inconvenience and it happens. As I said, I am not here to complain about the cost to me. It is £250 a time to hire a skip and it is a lot of work.

What would work extremely well, because this happens again and again in certain locations, is CCTV. But if you put up CCTV you have to put up a sign saying that you have put up CCTV, otherwise you cannot bring a prosecution based on it. Now, if you put up a sign saying that there is CCTV in a gateway, you are simply shifting the problem to somebody else’s gateway.

I worry that the cost of legitimately disposing of waste is too high and the inconvenience too great. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, touched on this as well. More effort needs to go into making it easier for households to find somewhere to dispose of their waste cheaply and easily. That would help a lot.

I think this amendment would help and it is right that landowners should not have to bear the cost of removing this stuff from their land, but further changes are necessary to alter the incentives and stop the dreadful nuisance created. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, in asking for further detail on what the Bill is likely to be able to enable, in terms of secondary legislation, to try to tackle this problem.

While I am on my feet, may I touch on one other issue? If you go for a walk on remote moorland in the Pennines, you encounter zero litter except one thing that you encounter on every walk and that is birthday balloons. They just appear all the time, but not in very large numbers. They are not terribly inconvenient and not so difficult to get rid of—you stuff them in your pocket—but it is upsetting in a beautiful landscape suddenly to find something shiny and bright purple. Well, purple is all right on a moorland—bright yellow, shall we say? It would be quite easy to ask the birthday balloon industry always to put an address on birthday balloons, so that I could send them back in a package.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to listen to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, and my noble friend Lord Ridley, who set out the case for this amendment so convincingly and cogently. I can be very brief by comparison. I strongly support these amendments. It is simply a matter of natural justice and fairness. If someone dumps their old sofa or mattress in the street or a council car park, the council will initially bear the cost of removing them and then, of course, the council tax payers will share that cost. Of course, in an ideal world, people would not do that, like the people who left a bathtub, a commode and a pile of polystyrene beside some official recycling bins I was using recently. I would love it if we could catch in every case the despicable people who dump their garbage like that, but catching them, as my noble friend said, is very difficult.

The police and councils need to put more effort into tracking down the organised criminals who dump commercial and building rubbish in the countryside on a vast scale. What is worse, when these same vile individuals dump their rubbish in a farmer’s field or lane, there is no council or council tax payer to share the cost. The farmer has to bear the complete cost of removal. Of course, some of that waste may have poisoned his land and his animals. That is simply wrong and unfair. The cost burden has to be shared among society, as these amendments would provide for, and be passed on to producers.

I perfectly well accept that Mercers, Sealy beds and Argos did not dump the mattress or the sofa and that their hands are clean in that regard, but they profited from the original sale of the items. The farmer got no financial benefit from the sale, but has to pay the cost of their disposal. That is not right, and it is why I support the amendments.