Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to reduce fly-tipping in Newbury constituency.

Local councils are responsible for tackling fly-tipping in their area and have a range of enforcement powers to help them do so. These include fixed penalty notices of up to £1000 and prosecution action. We have published best practice guidance and case studies on the website of the National Fly-Tipping Prevention Group, which will support councils to make better use of their power to seize vehicles of suspected fly-tippers.

We are seeking powers in the Crime and Policing Bill to provide statutory fly-tipping enforcement guidance to support councils to consistently, appropriately and effectively exercise these existing powers.

Defra chairs the National Fly-Tipping Prevention Group through which we work with a wide range of stakeholders to share good practice on preventing fly-tipping.

We committed in our manifesto to force fly-tippers and vandals to clean up their mess. Defra will consult on giving local councils the powers to issue fly-tippers with conditional cautions, one of a range of pre-court community-based sanctions. These cautions could see offenders complete up to 20 hours of unpaid work, cleaning our streets or parks, and pay back the cost of cleaning up the waste that they have dumped on public land. If an offender admits to the crime, agrees to the caution and complies with the conditions, they will not face prosecution.

We are looking at measures to award penalty points on driving licences for those found guilty of fly-tipping – which could lead to them losing their licences altogether. This would make it harder for offenders to continue dumping illegally if they are disqualified from driving and send a clear warning that fly-tipping is not tolerated.

Currently within the Newbury constituency, there are no reports of large-scale fly tips being investigated by the Environment Agency. There is one major Environment Agency investigation that includes (but isn’t limited to) an illegal waste site in the constituency.

Depositing of new waste to this illegal site has been stopped since 2024.