Fly-tipping

Afzal Khan Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Deirdre Costigan]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. As she has said, Ealing Southall is certainly not a rural area of the country. However, my father’s family are from Tipperary, and they were farmers; I do appreciate, and am well aware, of the cost of fly-tipping to farmers in particular. As it is on private land, they are, in most cases, liable for the costs of removal themselves. It is a massive issue, and I do hope that we will hear from others today on that issue. Certainly, there is more that we can do on reporting because, as I said earlier, the reports that we currently have are only the tip of the iceberg as a lot of communities just do not report.

Having gone through the problems and realised that the solutions are complex, what solutions do I feel should be included in the national strategy? To combat the organised criminals, we need a national fly-tip investigation team. Why should environmental crime not be taken as seriously as other types of organised crime? We need national financial investigators who can use proceeds of crime laws to go after the assets of these criminals and hit them in their pockets, where it really hurts.

We also need sentencing guidelines to be reviewed so that the courts do not continue to allow fly-tippers to get away with it. We need to reform the waste carrier licensing scheme so that it is worth the paper that it is written on. We need stronger rules for bins when houses are broken up into flats; I am delighted that Ealing council is introducing a new requirement for planning permission for HMOs—houses in multiple occupation. But we need to ensure that waste facilities are rigorously assessed as part of landlord licensing schemes and before permission is given for flat conversions, and that councils have the funding to carry out those inspections.

[Afzal Khan (Manchester Rusholme) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and for the progress she is making on such an important topic. Keep Manchester Tidy established a partnership with Manchester city council to encourage residents to actively help make their communities cleaner. As part of that strategy this year, Manchester saw its highest number of volunteers supporting the national Great British Spring Clean, with more than 100 litter-picking events and more than 2,000 litter-pickers. Will my hon. Friend join me in thanking all the volunteers who work extremely hard to make our communities cleaner and greener? Does she agree that they should not have to do this in the first place?

[Deirdre Costigan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I certainly agree that the work of local volunteers is hugely beneficial in preventing this problem from being even worse than it is at the moment. I know that, in Ealing, we would not survive without the work of our great friends in LAGER Can, and it sounds as if my hon. Friend has similarly civic-minded residents in his constituency too. I congratulate them on the work that they have done.

The most obvious answer to the fly-tipping crisis is to reduce waste in the first place. Let us turn off the tap of all of the waste that we see on our streets. That could be a real game changer. I know that the Minister has already committed to introducing a deposit return scheme for drinks containers by 2027 that would mean that empty cans and bottles could be returned to shops to get a deposit back. As well as cutting down on empty cans and bottles in black-sack fly-tips, research by Eunomia found that a return scheme could save councils in England up to £35 million annually. We could then spend that money on something else.

I hope that the Minister will consider the merits of a scheme that covers all reusable containers, including glass, from the outset, and it would be useful if she laid out a timetable for bringing that forward. Manufacturers should contribute to the costs to councils of clear-up by providing more take-back services so that people can hand in old furniture and mattresses when they buy new ones. The big prize is to persuade manufacturers to make their goods fully recyclable; the best way to do that is to make them pay for the cost of disposal. That is based on the idea of making the polluter pay. I hope the Minister will also set out a timetable for that approach, known as extended producer responsibility. It will encourage manufacturers to stop producing so much packaging and items that cannot be easily recycled.

Fly-tipping is not a low-level crime. It stops people from feeling proud of where they live, it encourages other crime and antisocial behaviour, and it costs millions of pounds to clean up—money that could be used for vital public services. I look forward to the Minister giving my constituents in Ealing Southall confidence that, after over a decade of inaction by the Conservatives, this new Labour Government will finally take fly-tipping seriously, with a national fly-tipping strategy, stiffer penalties for the culprits, and ways of reducing waste in the first place.