Fly-tipping in Rural Areas

Michael Tomlinson Excerpts

Tuesday 21st November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Ind)]

Fly-tipping is a very serious issue in my rural Devon constituency. I am pleased to see that so many Members, some of whom may wish to intervene during my speech, are still in the Chamber. That clearly shows that this is not just a topic for Devon, but applies to all the beautiful parts of the countryside where there is the blight of tipping.

What is fly-tipping? It is the illegal disposal of household, industrial, commercial or controlled waste. The challenge is that it is difficult to find any specific legislation that deals with the problem. If we look at the continuum of waste disposal in our beautiful countryside, we see at one end what I would describe as the litter louts who cannot be bothered to put their Coke tins in a bin, and at the other end formal waste disposal, with properly regulated sites and a compliance formula. Fly-tipping comes somewhere in the middle. Individuals are involved, but in this instance it is not the odd Coke bottle but a large item such as a fridge. Those people do not want to pay the tip charge, so what do they do? They stick the item in the back of the car or in a van, and dump it in a country lane.

Then there is the activity that is closer to the formal waste disposal end. Gangs, or criminals, think, “We can make some money out of this. Households do not want to go to the trouble of getting rid of their own waste, so we, for a fee—and we will not tell them that we will not be paying the tip fee—will take that rubbish and dump it in a lane.”

I was pleased to read the Government’s recently published litter strategy, but I must add that fly-tipping takes up only one page of it. We need to pay a lot more attention to the grey area between the litter issue and the properly legislated waste disposal issue, because this is a blight on our environment. It is a source of pollution, a danger to public health and a hazard to wildlife, and the bad news is that it is increasing. In English local authorities, 1 million cases were reported last year, which represents a 7% increase on the year before—and remember, those are just the cases that are reported. Many more go unreported, so I suspect that the number is in fact much more significant. The cost of the clear-up has also risen steeply. In the past year, it was £58 million; in the previous year, it was £15 million.

[Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is right to say that this does not just affect her constituents in Devon; it also affects mine in Dorset and doubtless those of many other Members. The cost falls not only on local authorities but often on landowners and farmers. Does she agree that, although the Government have taken some positive steps, we need to look closely to see how the burden can be fairly distributed, because this is not the fault of those landowners and farmers?

[Anne Marie Morris]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Central Government and local authorities are effectively contributing to the cost—there is a contribution from the taxpayer through central Government—but there is a burden on individual landowners and a requirement for them to clear up the land, and they get absolutely no contribution towards doing that. This is absolutely something that we need to look at because, as he says, it is not fair. What we want is, in the Government’s words, for the polluter to pay. It seems to me that the victims are paying, not the polluters. Fly-tipping is definitely on the increase. Most of it involves household waste, and to be fair, most of it is tipped on the highway, but an increasing amount is tipped on farmland and in woodland.