Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Carter of Haslemere Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the support of my noble friend.

This is an important issue. I have campaigned for many years around fly-tipping and the importance of having a stronger regulatory settlement, so I very much support my noble friend’s amendments in this group. It is a very large-scale problem: the noble Lord, Lord Katz, I believe, referred at an earlier stage to an estimate of some 1.15 million fly-tipping events reported to local authorities. That is a huge number, and I expect that that thoroughly underreports the true scale of the problem.

The noble Lord, Lord Katz, was kind enough to write to me in response to a question I raised on 17 November in Committee, when I inquired as to the number of cost recovery orders that had been successfully made by the courts. It appears that the Government do not hold that information. I looked at the manifesto, about which we have heard an awful lot in this Parliament, and indeed today, and there was a commitment to make the fly-tippers pay for the clear-up, yet the Government do not hold the statistics. I am slightly puzzled as to how the Government are going to make progress on that without holding the relevant information. The noble Lord, in his letter to me, did say that 1,378 fines had been made in respect of fly-tipping. That is a tiny number: it is 1 in 1,000, or 0.1%. It is quite clear —the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, in response to a question about the Kidlington outrage, agreed—that the current regulatory position is not working. This is a particular issue in the countryside, where there is a heavy burden on farmers, as we have heard. Here, I declare an interest of sorts, as the owner of a farm.

I have Amendment 21 in this group. Its effect is simple: it would place a duty on local waste authorities to remove waste and then to attempt to pursue cost recovery from the culprits. It builds, really, on Amendment 13, in my noble friend’s name, which seeks to amend the guidance. Both have a similar intent. In my view, it is simply unfair that the victim of the crime should be responsible for clearing it up. There are many factors that drive this crime, but at least two are within the direct control of public authorities as a whole—namely, the pricing of the landfill tax and, as my noble friend referred to, the accessibility of waste disposal facilities, and the Environment Agency and police enforcement effort.

My noble friend referred to the incident reported of a farmer who recently had 200 tonnes of rubbish dumped on his land. This is a perfect illustration of the problem that landowners, and indeed community trusts and others—for example, sports grounds and football clubs and so forth—can face. This individual faced a bill for some £40,000. Now, I understand that the council and the police had failed to identify the culprits and had failed to protect him after repeated previous incidents. Indeed, he alleges that he had also been the victim of intimidation. Why should he face financial ruin for the failures of public authorities to protect him from the actions of a criminal gang?

I would argue that it is simply not realistic, nor is it fair, to expect landowners to take on the role of detective to identify offenders and then to pursue them for the recovery of costs. They do not know how to make the various agencies involved work more effectively, they are vulnerable to intimidation and they do not have the resources.

The time has now come for the responsibility for protection, clear-up, investigation and prosecution to sit with the appropriate and relevant public agencies. To my mind, the arguments for doing this are clear, as it would create a complete system where public sector agencies control landfill pricing, access to legitimate waste disposal sites, identification and prosecution of culprits, and recovery of costs. This would incentivise the Environment Agency, the police and local waste authorities to be much more proactive in pursuing the culprits, facilitating their prosecution and recovering their costs. It would allow for faster removal, which is a very important factor. With waste lying around on farmland, private land or any open ground, one thing follows another, and more suddenly turns up. It would also give much fairer treatment to landowners.

It is clear that the current system is not working. On the one hand, we have had a member of the public being fined for pouring the dregs of her cup of coffee down the drain, but, on the other hand, no one seems to have noticed or done anything to stop at least 300 heavy goods vehicles dumping upwards of 10,000 tonnes of rubbish illegally in Kidlington. How can that possibly have happened? How can we have confidence in the system? If it cannot catch 300 trucks, what chance does the poor landowner have in this type of situation? This is a failure of the whole government system in the broadest sense of the term—central agencies and local—to protect victims. They now need to take responsibility.

I support my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower’s other amendments, all of which are designed to strengthen the regulatory settlement to tackle fly-tipping. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support the intention and spirit of Amendment 13. Fly-tipping shows a shocking disregard for other people, the local community, society and the environment. It is not right that the cost of removing the consequences of it fall on the victims, as has been said, at huge expense.

My point is a technical one about the way that this amendment is drafted. I do not think that imposing this liability in guidance is the right way to go about it. Guidance is not normally legally binding. Those to whom it is addressed have to have regard to it, simply—even if it is laid before Parliament with a stronger procedure, as I think the Government are proposing. In my view, the right way to do it is by an amendment to Section 33(8) and (9) of the Environmental Protection Act, where the penalties for the offence are set out. That would be the correct place to put it. That is the approach taken in Amendment 19, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower. While I strongly support the amendment, and would vote for it in any Division, I think the way it is drafted is not quite right.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a director of a farming company that is regularly the victim of fly-tipping of various scales.

I agree absolutely with every word that the noble Viscount shared with us a little while ago. I would add that the waste, often toxic waste, piled up on land is getting into the watercourses. This is a serious issue. Very often, landowners, even if they have the wherewithal to finance its removal, which many of them do not, do not have the technical expertise to deal with toxic waste. I spoke about this in Committee, so I am not going to go on in great detail, but it is a huge problem and every day it is getting worse.

The current legislation, which I have probed through Written Questions, is absolutely clear that the local authorities have no responsibility currently to do anything to assist, either through punitive legislation, assisting in the clean-up or by financially supporting those who are trying to do the clean-up. There is no support at all. We cannot allow this to continue. These amendments are a good start in the right direction.

To illustrate that, I will share one experience that I had. On a farm track, a large amount of building materials and other unpleasant items was tipped out of a truck. The perpetrators were so confident of not being caught or punished that they even threw on the pile the parking ticket that they had got earlier that day with the registration number. I called the police, who, to their credit, came out; we looked at it together, and afterwards I spent the weekend clearing it up. I showed the parking ticket to the policeman, who said, “Yes, that’s all very helpful, but I am not going to tell you whose vehicle it is in case you do something. I can assure you that, if we were to contact the people whose vehicle this is, they will simply say, ‘A lot of people drive that truck; it wasn’t me. I don’t know who it was; all sorts of people drive it’, and nothing will happen”. No further action was taken. That is one tiny example of the sort of things that people in rural areas face with waste, which is mainly generated in cities and simply taken out into the countryside and dumped with complete impunity.