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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the potential effect of a reduction in local government funding on litter and fly tipping.

The provisional Local Government Finance Settlement was announced on 15 December. This is the second year of a four year settlement where local authority core spending power is set to increase from £44.5 billion in 2015-16 to £44.7 billion in 2019-20. Councils in England will receive more than £200 billion for local services over the lifetime of this Parliament.

In December 2015, the Government announced that it would develop a Litter Strategy for England. We want to be ambitious: our goal is to achieve a substantial reduction in litter and littering in England, ensuring that our communities, natural landscape, roads and highways are free of litter.

We are committed to tackling fly-tipping and, as set out in the Government’s manifesto, have given local councils the power to issue fixed penalty notices for small-scale fly-tipping. These new enforcement tools have been available to councils since May 2016, providing them with an alternative to prosecutions and assisting them in taking a proportionate enforcement response. This builds on previous action to tackle fly-tipping.

The presence of litter or fly-tipped waste in the area can put off potential customers and investors. It will therefore be in local authorities’ interests to keep their communities consistently clean to support a thriving local economy. The Government believes that local authorities are best placed to decide how best to meet their statutory duty to keep their relevant land clear of litter and refuse, and how to prioritise this against other local services.