Fly-tipping

Sarah Dyke Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Deirdre Costigan]

I certainly agree. I will return later to my hon. Friend’s point about making the polluter pay. Currently it is certainly not worth councils’ time or money in many instances to take fly-tippers to court because the fines, and indeed the sentencing, do not act as a deterrent. Some people feel it is okay to leave their rubbish at the end of the street because the council will pick it up. This is a vicious cycle and we need to break it.

Secondly, in the small number of cases that do go to court, magistrates do not take the issue seriously enough or understand how fly-tipping blights the life of local communities. The sentencing just is not enough to make people think twice. The criminals who make a pretty penny by offering to take away waste for 20 quid tell the court they are unemployed, so they get away with not having to pay. The waste carrier licensing system is also so lax that it is hard for someone to lose their licence, even if they have broken the rules and been convicted.

Thirdly, there is a problem with housing in London. We know that there is not enough of it and that is why this Government have committed to building 1.5 million new homes. Right now, in Ealing Southall, there are people living in overcrowded accommodation, where there is often not enough space for a bin. I have also been told by many of my constituents that tenants sometimes illegally sub-let a room, but insist that the new tenant does not use the rubbish bins so that the landlord does not find out.

Finally, there is just too much waste in the first place. As a nation, we are drowning in unnecessary packaging, single-use drink containers, and household items that are difficult and expensive to recycle. We have to be honest about fly-tipping. In a Keep Britain Tidy study, one in five people in London admitted that they had fly-tipped themselves—this is often black-sack fly-tipping. It is simply not an excuse that the council is not doing enough because every council in London offers a free kerbside collection for black-sack rubbish. However, people often do not see this as fly-tipping, and it is very difficult to change their behaviour. No amount of education seems to work.

Trying to stop people from fly-tipping is a huge challenge. Keep Britain Tidy has piloted a number of schemes, including in Newham, that have had some success, but the schemes often simply move fly-tipping to the next road. Some councils have tried community skips, including my neighbouring authority of Brent. However, despite the council’s hard work, Brent sadly still has the highest fly-tipping rate in London, at 34,000 incidents a year. Although residents like the community skip, it does not stop people from fly-tipping.

The recycling charity WRAP has found that there is no evidence at all to link free bulky waste disposal with a reduction in fly-tipping. Even the Conservative Hampshire County Council acknowledged that fly-tipping did not increase when it started to charge for DIY waste. Just as it is clear that there is not one cause of fly-tipping, so it follows that there is not one answer.

This is a complex problem that needs a number of different approaches. Crucially, it needs to be led by Government, not by cash-strapped councils. We need a national strategy to combat fly-tipping, which will bring together the Environment Agency, councils, Keep Britain Tidy, waste disposal authorities and other stakeholders to crack this problem once and for all.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for securing this important debate. The Environment Agency found that 86% of farmers have been affected by fly-tipping this year. However, many of those incidents are not reported because the reporting process is time-consuming, confusing and frustrating, and it does not stack up for farmers to do it. So they clear the waste themselves. Does the hon. Member agree that a single reporting mechanism needs to be developed to help farmers and land managers? I appreciate that the hon. Member is leading a very urban debate, but I think that the mechanism is important. A single mechanism should be in place so that a fly-tip should have to be reported only once.

[Deirdre Costigan]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. As she has said, Ealing Southall is certainly not a rural area of the country. However, my father’s family are from Tipperary, and they were farmers; I do appreciate, and am well aware, of the cost of fly-tipping to farmers in particular. As it is on private land, they are, in most cases, liable for the costs of removal themselves. It is a massive issue, and I do hope that we will hear from others today on that issue. Certainly, there is more that we can do on reporting because, as I said earlier, the reports that we currently have are only the tip of the iceberg as a lot of communities just do not report.

Having gone through the problems and realised that the solutions are complex, what solutions do I feel should be included in the national strategy? To combat the organised criminals, we need a national fly-tip investigation team. Why should environmental crime not be taken as seriously as other types of organised crime? We need national financial investigators who can use proceeds of crime laws to go after the assets of these criminals and hit them in their pockets, where it really hurts.

We also need sentencing guidelines to be reviewed so that the courts do not continue to allow fly-tippers to get away with it. We need to reform the waste carrier licensing scheme so that it is worth the paper that it is written on. We need stronger rules for bins when houses are broken up into flats; I am delighted that Ealing council is introducing a new requirement for planning permission for HMOs—houses in multiple occupation. But we need to ensure that waste facilities are rigorously assessed as part of landlord licensing schemes and before permission is given for flat conversions, and that councils have the funding to carry out those inspections.

Flood Defences: West Worcestershire

Sarah Dyke Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, and what a pleasure you have had in listening to such an excellent array of maiden speeches this afternoon. I thank Mr Speaker for allocating me one of the first Adjournment debates in this new Parliament.

My speech will be more of a reiteration of certain points and less of a novelty, as I was lucky enough to get an Adjournment debate on the same flood defences at the beginning of the last Parliament. During that winter, we suffered not only from coronavirus but from Storms Ciara and Dennis.

I congratulate the floods Minister, the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), on her appointment. She and I were colleagues on the Treasury Committee, and I know how passionately and genuinely she cares about flooding issues, so I look forward to working with her.

My constituency is in a part of the world that floods frequently, and we realise that we will flood a lot in West Worcestershire. We have the River Severn running through the middle of the constituency, and the Rivers Avon and Teme flow into the Severn just south of Worcester, so we accept that flooding is a part of nature and part of what we have in West Worcestershire.

In the years that I have been fortunate enough to represent the area in Parliament, and before, I have tried to mitigate some of the problems that arise from being in a very flood-prone part of the world. Last winter, we again saw how difficult it can be when there is a very wet winter. Many local farmers, residents and businesses were very grateful for funding from the flood recovery fund after Storms Babet and Henk.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

Rural areas are often the worst impacted by flood damage, yet they are often deemed less of a priority for flood defences than urban areas. Does the hon. Lady agree that the flood defence grant in aid cost-benefit analysis must be reviewed to ensure it sufficiently values agricultural and rural communities?

[Dame Harriett Baldwin]

The hon. Lady highlights something that I have grappled with throughout my time as a Member of Parliament.

I will now move on to the situation in Tenbury Wells in my constituency. Seventeen years ago this month, in the middle of summer, we had the most severe flooding for many, many years. It caused massive damage and misery across West Worcestershire. In fact, it was the right hon. Member for Leeds South (Hilary Benn) who was the Environment Minister at the time. In 2007, he came to see the devastation in Tenbury Wells. It was at that time that I first started to look into these cost-benefit analyses and the formula that the hon. Lady raised. While accepting that, in West Worcestershire, we will flood regularly, I think that there are many things we can do to mitigate the misery of being flooded, and of being flooded regularly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Harriett Baldwin]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He points to a fact that I acknowledge: cumulatively, we have become more resilient to flooding in West Worcestershire over the last 14 years, but there are still these two schemes. That was going to be my next question to the Minister: will she confirm that the new Government will continue with the same level of spending that my hon. Friend mentioned? Is there anything that I could do, other than leading debates such as this and meeting with the chief executive of the Environment Agency, that would help locally to unblock any of the issues?

I know that these schemes, particularly the one in Tenbury Wells, are complicated. I just want the Environment Agency to be able to find its way through the obstacles. The local community knows that in order to make the omelette that is the flood defences of Tenbury Wells, a few eggs will need to be broken, with a few road closures at times and potentially some loss of road space down some side roads. I just want to say on behalf of the community that it is prepared to put up with that level of inconvenience and some traffic disruption for a while in order to protect its beautiful town. As can be seen from the other examples in West Worcestershire that I have mentioned, particularly Upton upon Severn, the long-term benefit of protecting the town is immeasurable.

Will the Minister join me in an effort of shared persistence and determination to protect these two communities by finally getting the two schemes built, preferably before the inevitable arrival of the next serious floods? Finally, will she confirm that she will press ahead with the expanded offer of the farming recovery fund? Farmers in my constituency and elsewhere think it is very important that the offer includes those who experienced damage due to extreme rainfall, and not just those who experienced flooded land.

[Sarah Dyke]

On that point, will the hon. Lady give way?