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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many instances of fly tipping have been recorded on the public forest estate in each of the last 10 years.

Forestry England and Forestry Commission are required to report operational waste volumes by category under the Greening Government Commitments (GGC) to Defra. There is no requirement to record or report the number of fly-tipping incidents.

Due to the size of our estate and available resources, it has historically proven impractical to systematically record all instances of fly tipping. Forestry England does not therefore hold complete historical records for the period requested. The number of instances that have been recorded across the public forest estate are as follows:

2016-17: 18 instances

2017-18: 11 instances

2018-19: 111 instances

2019-20: 88 instances

2020-21: 164 instances

2021-22: 116 instances

2022-23: 76 instances

2023-24: 683 instances

2024-25: 57 instances

2025-26: 53 instances

Since 2023-24 Forestry England has put in place additional mechanisms to record collected waste categorised as fly tip through our national waste contract with Green Zone. This has been recorded in tonnes, rather than as individual instances. Reported data for the past three financial years:

2023-24: 218.98 tonnes

2024-25: 181.01 tonnes

2025-26: 178.62 tonnes