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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to support local councils in tackling fly-tipping.

The PM’s Anti-social Behaviour Action Plan sets out how we will help councils take tougher action against those who fly-tip. This includes significantly raising the upper limit on the penalties councils can issue to £1,000 for fly-tipping and £600 for householders who give their waste to an unauthorised carrier, which we did in July. We have also increased transparency on the use of these penalties by publishing league tables and consulted stakeholders on ringfencing the money raised from these penalties for enforcement and clean up activity.

This builds on the £1.2m Defra has provided in grant funding to help more than 30 councils implement projects cracking down on fly-tipping. A selection of case studies from round one are available online so that others can learn about those interventions which were most successful. These can be found at https://www.keepbritaintidy.org/fly-tipping-intervention-grant-scheme. We have recently launched another grant opportunity that could see a further £1m handed out in grants to help more councils tackle the issue.

With the National Fly-Tipping Prevention Group, we are developing a toolkit to help councils and others tackle fly-tipping. So far, the group has published a guide on how to present robust cases to court and a new framework which sets out how to set up and run effective local partnerships. The toolkit, and other resources, are available online at https://www.keepbritaintidy.org/fly-tipping-intervention-grant-scheme.