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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to support effective coordinated action between relevant agencies on tackling fly tipping.

Defra continues to chair the National Fly-tipping Prevention Group (NFTPG) which is made up a wide range of interested bodies including the National Police Chiefs Council, enforcement agencies, organisations representing private landowners and local authorities to explore ways to tackle fly-tipping and share best practice. We are currently working with the NFTPG to produce a fly-tipping toolkit. We intend to publish the first part of this toolkit, a guide on how councils and others can present robust prosecutions, shortly. Future elements of the toolkit will cover how local authorities can set up effective fly-tipping partnerships, the use of new technology to report fly-tipping and the sharing of intelligence between relevant stakeholders.

In addition, the Joint Unit for Waste Crime (JUWC) was launched in 2020. The JUWC is a taskforce dedicated to tackling serious and organised criminality in the waste sector, including the most serious incidents of large-scale illegal dumping. The Unit brings together agencies across the UK including: the Environment Agency; Natural Resources Wales; the Scottish Environment Protection Agency; the Northern Ireland EA; the Police; HMRC; the British Transport Police; and the National Crime Agency.