Crime and Policing Bill (Fourth sitting)

Lauren Sullivan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[David Burton-Sampson]

Absolutely. I could not have said it better myself.

We need to get this provision into law as quickly as possible, as part of this whole raft of changes. The police need to be able to act promptly when they see these ridiculous vehicles causing so many problems on our roads and in our communities.

[Dr Lauren Sullivan (Gravesham) (Lab)]

These vehicles are also having a huge impact in Riverview and Coldharbour, in my community. The police have been doing some good work with drones to follow these people to their home addresses. With the change in the law to allow police to seize the vehicles straight away, does my hon. Friend think that such interventions could support the police and communities in cracking down on the problem?

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[Jack Rankin (Windsor) (Con)]

I am glad to see clause 9 because, as several hon. Members on the Opposition Benches have mentioned, fly-tipping is a particular problem in many rural constituencies. In Berkshire, where the majority of my seat lies, there were 7,700 instances of fly-tipping in 2023-24. We are a small county, but that is 20 reports a day. In the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, where most of my constituency is, the figure rose to 1,902 in the past year, which is up 52% on the year before, when we had 1,249. The issue is of greater prevalence than in the past, and I welcome the Government including clauses to try to make a difference.

We have also seen a change in the nature of fly-tipping. Two or three years ago, in Berkshire, most of it was on council land, in car parks or parks, in the hope that the local authority might pick it up, but now we see what might be called smaller-scale highways incidents, with the dumping of waste on public roads, pavements or grass verges. In the past year, 778 of the 900 instances in the royal borough consisted of what were described as a car boot or less. To me, that indicates a prevalence of individuals or waste from small-scale dumpsters, perhaps from small businesses—perhaps we are seeing fewer large-scale illegal waste operations. I put that very much in the bucket of antisocial behaviour.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton West and the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset said, that is a particular concern to local farmers. I will quote Colin Rayner, a constituent of mine and a farmer. I will first declare an interest, that Colin is a personal friend and the president of Windsor Conservatives, but he is well placed and I pick him for his expertise rather than my relationship with him. To quote the Maidenhead Advertiser, he said that

“the family farms have incidents of fly-tipping every day, from a bag of garden waste to lorry loads of waste…‘We have made our farms into medieval forts to try to reduce large loads of waste been tipped on the farms’.”

He has also spoken to me about the cost to his business of extra security and, indeed, of the cleaning up.

That last point is why I welcome the amendment moved by the Opposition to make the cost sit with the offender and not with the landowner. It is not appropriate that Mr Rayner and his companies pay; the person who is offending should. Also, new clause 24 on driving licences, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton West, seems to be a way to get at just such small-scale operations. That might be something that is tangible and real to a small business or an individual doing the fly-tipping. I absolutely welcome the amendment and the new clause.

When the guidance comes forward, I encourage the Minister to be as tough as possible—which I think is her intent, but perhaps she will speak to that in her wind-up. We should use the power to search and seize vehicles in the case of persistent offenders. I want to see serious fixed penalty notices for people caught fly-tipping, and I want extra powers of investigation and prosecution. I will welcome the Minister’s comments.

[Dr Sullivan]

Fly-tipping is a blight on our communities—I think we all share that view. The misconception is that fly-tipping is small scale, but it is committed by criminals and unscrupulous small waste-removal businesses that can have links to organised crime. It is a huge money-making machine. It is an issue that local authorities have had to grapple with for many decades. In many cases, it has been worsened by environmental measures and stronger recycling and waste collection rules.

I pay tribute and give credit to my local authority, Gravesham borough council. In 2019, it set out a bold antisocial behaviour strategy, which looked at fly-tipping at its source and at its heart. In 2020, the council set up the environment enforcement team, which has used a variety of different techniques to prevent, to tackle, to educate and to prosecute. Since then, 386 community protection warnings, 50 fly-tipping fines and 12 duty-of-care fines for waste carriage breaches have been issued, as well as 39 cases resulting in successful prosecutions in court.

The council and its media team work closely with Kent police to raise awareness and deter potential offenders. I would like to put on record my thanks to its team. The council was able to take that action because of past legislation, including the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 and the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005. I could go on, but there are now many legislative options for local authorities to tackle the issue and take people to court. Where fines are handed out, there is an issue with the backlog in the courts, but I know that the Minister is looking at streamlining some of those court issues, which arose from the neglect of the last 14 years.

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[Dame Diana Johnson]

This has been a really useful debate. It has highlighted the problems that society is facing with the epidemic levels of knife crime that we have seen in recent times. It was absolutely right for my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West and Leigh to mention Liam Taylor and his grandmother, Julie. Liam is sadly no longer with us, but I pay tribute to Julie for her sterling work in trying to ensure that what happened to her grandson does not happen to anybody else. I also commend her work on the bleed control kits.

I have come across so many families who have lost a loved one through knife crime and want to ensure that it does not happen to anyone else. We need to pay tribute to those families, including those who have joined the coalition to tackle knife crime, which the Prime Minister set up soon after the election last July. They will hold this Government to account in doing what we have said we will, which is halve knife crime over the course of the next decade. I pay tribute to Julie and all the other families working in this space to protect young people and make sure that no other family has to suffer the loss of a young person.

[Dr Sullivan]

A recent meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on youth affairs heard from young St John’s Ambulance volunteers. They told us that many of the young people they work with want first-aid training and help with the kits so that they know how to stop bleeding. Is that not an awful indictment of the society we are in, but also a positive thing, in that young people want to be part of the solution?