Fly-tipping: Penalties

Baroness Laing of Elderslie Excerpts

Thursday 1st October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Pow]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, but there are other measures that I believe will help local authorities, and there are certain reasons why they have been unable to tackle all the incidents he mentions.

We have previously worked with the Sentencing Council to amend sentencing guidance for magistrates, but I acknowledge that the sentences handed down do not always reflect the severity of the crime committed or the costs borne by the victim. It is for this reason that the Government committed in our manifesto to increasing penalties for fly-tipping, and we acknowledged in our waste and resources strategy that there is more to do to strengthen sentences, especially in magistrates courts.

Therefore, working with our partners in the national fly-tipping prevention group, which is chaired by DEFRA, we will continue to work with the Sentencing Council and the Judicial Office to explore ways of ensuring that the penalties handed down for fly-tipping are appropriate and proportionate to the offence committed. My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough raised this issue, and we are working on the sentencing, so this is in train.

The national fly-tipping prevention group has previously published a series of fly-tipping prevention guides, which include a recommendation for private landowners to consider installing appropriate deterrence signage and CCTV cameras, in recognition of the part that such measures can play. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough for his suggestions. It is important to note that increasing the penalties for fly-tipping is not the only approach that can be used to tackle this unacceptable crime. As he alluded to, our waste and resources strategy sets out our commitment to prevent, detect and deter waste crime, including fly-tipping.

The Government have been significantly impacted by coronavirus, but my officials are working hard to deliver on those commitments. Even during the lockdown we continued working on the strategy and on the waste measures. This includes developing a web-based fly-tipping toolkit to help local authorities and others, working in partnership, to tackle fly-tipping. In Hertfordshire, such an approach, using measures suggested by the toolkit, has seen incidents of fly-tipping fall by 10% in the first year. I have been asked whether this is working anywhere, and this shows that some local authorities are being successful in tackling fly-tipping. Lots of those ideas have been copied. The toolkit is still being worked on but will be available shortly. We think that it will help local authorities, for example by allowing them to follow best practice from other local authorities.

I am aware that in some instances, where a fly-tipper is taken to court, it is felt that the penalty does not always reflect the crime. Therefore, the toolkit also provide advice to local authorities taking fly-tippers to court on how to present a robust case, because often they take them to court but still they do not get the correct fine. So help and advice is out there for the local authorities too, to go armed with the right data and so on, so that the magistrates or the Crown court will give out the correct penalty or fine.

We are aware that a significant proportion of fly-tippers are those who masquerade as legitimate waste carriers before illegally dumping their customers’ waste. We are therefore working to reform the waste carrier, broker and dealer regime, and the Environment Bill, which we hope will come to Committee very soon, will contain powers to introduce the mandatory electronic tracking of waste, which will obviously be subject to consultation. That will, among other things, reduce the ability of waste criminals to hide evidence of the systematic mishandling of waste, and deter illegitimate operators from entering the sector. It will help to ensure that waste is dealt with appropriately, reducing instances where waste is not tracked and drops out of the system, which unfortunately does happen. We intend to consult on these proposals in 2021.

The Bill, which we hope will receive Royal Assent in 2021, includes a number of other measures to help tackle waste crime. As well as granting the power to regulate for the creation of a mandatory electronic waste-tracking system, it will simplify the process for enforcement authorities to enter residential or abandoned premises under a warrant without having to wait seven days. The current requirement to wait seven days enables the evidence to be hidden, removed or destroyed, so that change will be genuinely helpful. A new power will also be introduced to search for and seize evidence of waste crime. So there is a lot going on.

The Bill will reduce costs and bureaucracy when the police seize vehicles involved in waste crime on behalf of the Environment Agency. It will do so by removing the current practice whereby that is automatically done on behalf of the relevant waste collection authority unless an Environment Agency officer is present, and it will allow the police to seize a vehicle on behalf of the regulator. It should speed up the process and make it quicker and more proactive.

In addition, the Bill will allow for the level of fixed penalty notices to be amended through secondary legislation, so the calls in this place for higher penalties could become a possibility through secondary legislation. So we are listening to all these comments.

These extensive new powers, which have been widely discussed with stakeholders, will aid us in our fight to ensure that waste criminals, such as illegitimate waste operators reliant on fly-tipping for income, are held accountable for their actions.

I am pleased to update my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough on the Budget, which allocated half a million pounds in 2021 to support innovative approaches to tackling fly-tipping. We are exploring those funding opportunities and priorities right now. We are considering the role that mobile and web-based applications and research projects could play in tackling fly-tipping. As my hon. Friend mentions, our annual fly-tipping statistics currently report fly-tipping incidents recorded by local authorities, but they exclude those incidents on private land. He makes an extremely good point, which has been raised by many other people. We are therefore exploring ways that we could plug that data gap by potentially using mobile digital apps to record information. That could be extremely useful.

Before I wrap up, I want to acknowledge the incredible pressure that local authorities have been under during the coronavirus lockdown. It has been mentioned by many people, but in all honesty, I and DEFRA have been working really hard with the waste industry to get those household waste and recycling centres open—which they have done pretty quickly, considering what had hit them. They shut down initially, but they are pretty much all up and running now. I pay tribute to the whole sector, which has worked so hard.

As you can tell, Madam Deputy Speaker, I fully sympathise with hon. Members on this issue. I recognise that there are a lot concerns. The case has been very well made. I hope it is clear that extensive action is under way to cut down on unacceptable waste. There is a lot in the waste and resources strategy and the Environment Bill, and the national fly-tipping prevention group is working on all these measures. I hope that that gives a bit of reassurance that we are trying to crack down on this problem. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough for bringing the issue to us today.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Thank you. What an informative debate.

Question put and agreed to.