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 reduce litter and fly tipping.

The Government is developing 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.

The Litter Strategy for England will focus on three key themes: education and awareness; improving enforcement; and better cleansing and litter infrastructure. These will be backed up by specific actions under each objective. We are keen to publish the Strategy as soon as we can and a great deal of work is being done to achieve this.

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 other Government action to tackle fly-tipping, which has included: working with the Sentencing Council on its guideline for sentencing for environmental offences; making it easier for vehicles suspected of being involved in waste crime to be stopped, searched and seized; and continuing our work with the Defra chaired National Fly-Tipping Prevention Group to promote and disseminate good practice in the prevention, reporting, investigation and clearance of fly-tipped waste.