Fly-tipping: Residential Areas

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Any hon. Members who wish to take off their jackets have permission to do so. I call Melanie Onn to move the motion.

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of fly-tipping in residential areas and associated impacts.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to see so many colleagues here to participate in this important debate. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this debate and colleagues who supported my application.

Fly-tipping is often discussed as an environmental or waste management issue and a question of local authority enforcement. It is, of course, all those things, but in communities such as mine and across the country, it is more fundamental. It is about pride, belonging and whether people feel good about the place they call home. Residents often tell me they are tired of seeing mattresses dumped in alleyways, household waste abandoned on street corners and green spaces treated as rubbish tips.

Those are not isolated incidents; they become part of the everyday experience of a neighbourhood. The impact goes far beyond the physical waste itself. Surveys on environmental decay reveal that 86% of people living in heavily littered or fly-tipped neighbourhoods feel embarrassed by their area. It is terrible that people should feel that. That statistic ought to concern us all. Environmental degradation damages mental wellbeing, erodes civic pride and fuels a cycle of hopelessness that can leave residents feeling disconnected from the communities around them.

People deserve to feel proud when they walk down their street, and to feel that their neighbourhood matters. When fly-tipping becomes commonplace it sends exactly the opposite message. It tells residents that standards are slipping, that nobody cares and that decline is somehow acceptable. Once that perception takes hold it can be incredibly difficult to reverse.

We must also be honest about some of the pressures that have contributed to the problem. Across the country, councils have faced difficult decisions about waste services. Public waste disposal facilities have been reduced in some areas, opening hours have changed and restrictions have become more complicated. Residents frequently tell me that local tips can be difficult to use, with limitations on what can be taken, who can take it and how often visits can be made. None of that excuses criminal behaviour; those who dump waste illegally are responsible for their actions. But if we are serious about solving the problem, we need to understand all the factors that contribute to it.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind hon. Members that if they want to participate in the debate, they should bob at the end of every speech. I will call the Front-Bench spokespeople at 10.30 am. Doing the simple arithmetic, that means there will be a time limit of four minutes on speeches.

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[Jas Athwal]

I absolutely agree. I have been saying for the last 10 years that that should be done. The Government finally acting is a real positive; we are going in the right direction.

Fly-tipping blights our area, but when the council removes it quickly, people feel it is okay to dump rubbish on our streets because someone will pick it up. We cannot win either way; it becomes a vicious cycle. The more that people see the local area as a dumping ground, the more some feel enabled to fly-tip, meaning that the problem spirals unless it is fully tackled.

I know from working with my local council that decisive steps are being taken to tackle this blight on our communities. For instance, it maintains free bulky waste collection, removing a lame excuse for fly-tipping. It is cheaper to pick up from people’s doorsteps in a controlled manner than from the streets once the waste has been dumped. Redbridge council has implemented not only that policy, but the wall of shame, which is an approach that has been adopted by other councils: naming and shaming to expose the waste cowboys who impose their mess on us. That sends a clear message that such behaviour is unacceptable in Ilford South and that those who fly-tip on our streets will be held accountable.

I welcome the decisive actions the Government have already taken to support local authorities battling fly-tipping, from expanding council powers to crushing the vehicles of serial fly-tippers and making offenders clean up the very streets and parks they have ruined. We need to go further to target the very worst offenders. The council needs to be able to set larger maximum fines to generally deter serial fly-tippers and to demonstrate that although fly-tipping may seem inconsequential to them, it is one of the worst forms of antisocial behaviour. With tough enforcement, councils could use extra revenue to fund detection—

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order. Your time is up. Before calling the Front-Bench spokespeople, I remind hon. Members that although there are often good reasons for being late to a debate, it is a courtesy to both the Chair and other hon. Members participating in the debate to put in a note explaining those reasons. I call Sarah Dyke.

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[Dr Hudson]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. We have heard great contributions from across the House today.

Let me turn to some of the figures, which speak for themselves. Councils in England dealt with 1.26 million incidents of fly-tipping in 2024-25. That was a 9% increase on the previous year, and both the fifth successive annual increase and among the highest figure on record. The majority of those incidents, 62%, involved household waste. The most common sources were not lorry loads from organised criminals, although that is an issue I will come to, but car boots and small vans—everyday domestic dumps.

Across the country, our constituents have sadly become all too familiar with the sight of dumped bin bags, mattresses and white goods including fridges, freezers, washing machines and dishwashers. The effects are serious. As well as the obvious awful environmental consequences and the effects on nature and wildlife, fly-tipping is a public health problem, as dumped waste attracts vermin, creates fire risk and can contaminate soil and local watercourses. The harm is not only physical. Antisocial behaviour such as fly-tipping causes real anxiety and distress to residents who live with it.

Sadly, my constituents in Epping Forest are not immune to the blight of fly-tipping and its harmful impacts, with many serious cases across our area caused by shameless criminals who should face the full extent of the law. Fly-tipping threatens the precious wildlife and biodiversity that our forest of Epping Forest is so privileged to enjoy. As a positive counter to that situation, I have been privileged to meet unsung heroes, litter-picking groups right across Epping Forest, including Waltham Abbey community group and Theydon Bois parish council, who selflessly give up their time to clean up our communities, as I have seen at first hand on joining their litter picks.

However, the sight of copious numbers of discarded large nitrous oxide canisters, used illegally for drug misuse and then chucked on the side of roads for those who do the right thing to clear up, is incredibly concerning. As I have raised in the House many times—I raised it with the Minister just last week—any activity to clear up waste needs to address that issue as a priority for urban, rural and semi-rural communities alike. Will the Minister outline the steps that the Government are taking to tackle the illegal use of nitrous oxide and the subsequent discarding of dangerous canisters, damaging our environment?

The previous Conservative Government understood the fly-tipping problem and the need for further action. We increased the upper limit for fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping from £400 to £1,000 and established the Joint Unit for Waste Crime, a multi-agency taskforce bringing together key stakeholders, including the Environment Agency, the police, the National Crime Agency, the British Transport Police, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the National Fire Chiefs Council and the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management. Through intelligence sharing and resource prioritisation, it has supported hundreds of operations contributing to arrests. I am pleased that the current Government are continuing with that measure.

We Conservatives also introduced several projects across England that sought to crack down on fly-tipping in residential areas, including portable CCTV cameras to patrol and capture footage across Northumberland, anti-climb fencing to protect neighbourhood areas in Hyndburn and larger recycling bins in better locations in Mansfield to ensure that the public have access to the correct disposal facilities. Those projects had demonstrable positive effects.

In Durham, which received funding from the last Government, the county council introduced educational bin stickers and permanent signage and installed CCTV on existing lighting columns. As a result, fly-tipping was cut by more than 60%. In Hyndburn, installing fencing and gates to prevent access to fly-tipping hotspots saw fly-tipping decrease by 100% in those areas in the following three months. The council saved approximately £4,000 in waste removal and clean-up costs over that period.

In addition, the Conservative Government passed the landmark Environment Act 2021, which laid the foundation for electronic waste tracking, a measure the current Government are now implementing. I had the opportunity to discuss that with the Minister just last week as we passed a necessary piece of secondary legislation on that subject.

The Minister will be aware that His Majesty’s official Opposition tabled amendments during the passage of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 that would have added points to driving licences for fly-tipping. That was a Conservative manifesto commitment and it is most welcome that the Government have finally adopted that policy.

On the subject of manifestos, the Labour manifesto included this commitment:

“Fly-tippers and vandals will…be forced to clean up the mess they have created.”

I am sure that the Minister will have had the same conversations as I have had with farmers and landowners about the issue of fly-tipping on private property: that is not the responsibility of the local authority, whereas on public land it tends to be. We have heard about that from across the House today.

When the fly-tipping is on private property, the landowner in many cases is left to pay sometimes thousands of pounds to clean up someone else’s mess. To make the situation worse, the landowner may sometimes face landfill tax liabilities despite being the victim, not the perpetrator. Meanwhile, offenders frequently face little or no meaningful action. Once again, the figures speak for themselves: nine in 10 members of the Country Land and Business Association report being targeted within the past year, with over three quarters suffering a significant financial impact. Although stronger enforcement and prevention measures will help to reduce incidents happening, can the Minister outline what support is available to landowners and farmers who are being particularly targeted?

I would like to touch on the fact that although fly-tipping happens all over the country, some areas suffer more than others. The last Government provided targeted investment to the areas most affected by fly-tipping. Furthermore, just as the very act of fly-tipping varies geographically, so too does the rate of enforcement action. Only 31% of fly-tipping incidents are investigated, and over half the investigations result in no further action. Across England in 2024-25, there were just 13 custodial sentences for fly-tipping offences.

The Government have issued guidance to local councils, but guidance is one thing and action another. The Minister may be aware that the Countryside Alliance has called on the Government to incentivise local authorities to use the enforcement powers available to them. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on that suggestion.

We are united across the House in our shared desire to end fly-tipping and to ensure that those who commit this crime are punished appropriately. To do that, local authorities need the right resources and tools, but more importantly they need to use them. We can do more to tackle fly-tipping, and I hope that the Government come forward with ambitious proposals.

It has been great today to see so many people from across the House talking not only about this issue, but very much about what it means to their local community. A sense of optimism comes from highlighting the great work that local volunteers do. To conclude, I thank for their great contributions and interventions my hon. Friends the Members for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) and for Brigg and Immingham (Martin Vickers) and the hon. Members for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer), for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge), for Birmingham Perry Barr (Ayoub Khan), for Hexham (Joe Morris), for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin), for Broxtowe (Juliet Campbell), for North West Leicestershire (Amanda Hack), for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones), for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) and for Ilford South (Jas Athwal).

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order. I ask the Minister to leave a couple of minutes for the proposer of the debate to wind up.