Fly-tipping

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of fly-tipping.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford, in the first Westminster Hall debate that I have secured since being elected the MP for Ealing Southall. I have chosen the very important issue of fly-tipping for this first debate.

After 14 years of chaos from the previous Conservative Governments, we have an NHS in crisis, an economy that came close to collapse, communities living in fear of crime and a failure to act on the threat of environmental breakdown. My constituents in Ealing Southall recognise that fixing the NHS, putting police back on our streets, tackling the climate crisis and kick-starting growth in the economy need to be the new Government’s first priorities. However, for many of my constituents, it is what is outside their front door that matters most.

Let us imagine walking out of our homes every day to see a big pile of black sacks, broken furniture and kids’ toys at the corner of our streets. That is not the first thing we want to see on our way to work. Then, let us imagine we have invited our family or some friends around that evening. It is embarrassing to ask people to pick their way through sacks of rubbish and furniture when they come to visit. As one of my constituents told me,

“It’s disheartening to go out of your house.”

Another told me:

“I dream of the day I don’t have to pick my way through piles of rubbish to get down the street.”

In my constituency of Morecambe and Lunesdale, communities in Morecambe in particular are blighted by fly-tipping. I have noticed the damage that has done to their feelings of community pride. When someone treats people’s streets like a rubbish dump, it makes those people feel like rubbish. I thank my hon. Friend for recognising the psychological impact on communities. Does she agree that there is a deeply psychological impact and that this is not merely a matter of street cleansing?

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She is certainly right: that, too, is the experience of my constituents in Ealing Southall, where they have very much said that this is an issue of pride in their community. Much research has also been done on what is called the “broken windows syndrome”, in which fly-tipping also encourages crime and antisocial behaviour. My hon. Friend is certainly right in that regard.

My residents in Ealing Southall have identified Beaconsfield Road and Bridge Road, along with George Street in Hanwell, as key hotspots, but there many more. In fact, more than a million cases of fly-tipping are recorded every year in this country. Of course, many will not be recorded at all as communities just give up. One third of all fly-tipping takes place in London and eight London authorities were in the top 10 areas with the highest number of fly-tipping incidents in England, according to the most recent statistics. I am afraid to say that all too often it is the poorest areas of the country that are most likely to face such issues. That is due to overcrowded housing and a lack of outside space for bins, which are particular issues in London.

There are some great organisations fighting the scourge of fly-tipping. In Ealing, LAGER Can, whose representatives are here today watching the debate, does amazing work in partnership with the council—not just to clear litter, but to clear and report fly-tips. Nationally, Keep Britain Tidy has strenuously campaigned on the issue. The previous Government periodically announced new crackdowns on fly-tipping, but has that made a difference? I do not think my constituents in Ealing Southall noticed any improvements in 14 years of that Government’s supposed crackdowns; in fact, it is clear the problem has got worse.

Why did the previous Government fail to get a grip on the issue? First, only about 1% of fly-tips result in a court prosecution. That is because councils lost about two thirds of their funding over 14 years of Tory austerity, so they cannot afford to pay for the detailed and expensive investigations needed to take a fly-tipper to court. Even if they do try to take a fly-tipper to court, the average fine is only about £500, which does not pay the council’s costs. It is much quicker and cheaper for the council to just pick up the fly-tip. That solves the immediate problem, but of course people then start to think, “Well, I can dump my mattress or these few bags of rubbish on the corner because the council will pick them up.”

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. Does she agree that when councils seek to investigate, prosecute and prevent fly-tipping, they should be able to recover the full cost, including when issuing fixed penalty notices to those who are guilty? After all, it is the polluter who should pay.

I certainly agree. I will return later to my hon. Friend’s point about making the polluter pay. Currently it is certainly not worth councils’ time or money in many instances to take fly-tippers to court because the fines, and indeed the sentencing, do not act as a deterrent. Some people feel it is okay to leave their rubbish at the end of the street because the council will pick it up. This is a vicious cycle and we need to break it.

Secondly, in the small number of cases that do go to court, magistrates do not take the issue seriously enough or understand how fly-tipping blights the life of local communities. The sentencing just is not enough to make people think twice. The criminals who make a pretty penny by offering to take away waste for 20 quid tell the court they are unemployed, so they get away with not having to pay. The waste carrier licensing system is also so lax that it is hard for someone to lose their licence, even if they have broken the rules and been convicted.

Thirdly, there is a problem with housing in London. We know that there is not enough of it and that is why this Government have committed to building 1.5 million new homes. Right now, in Ealing Southall, there are people living in overcrowded accommodation, where there is often not enough space for a bin. I have also been told by many of my constituents that tenants sometimes illegally sub-let a room, but insist that the new tenant does not use the rubbish bins so that the landlord does not find out.

Finally, there is just too much waste in the first place. As a nation, we are drowning in unnecessary packaging, single-use drink containers, and household items that are difficult and expensive to recycle. We have to be honest about fly-tipping. In a Keep Britain Tidy study, one in five people in London admitted that they had fly-tipped themselves—this is often black-sack fly-tipping. It is simply not an excuse that the council is not doing enough because every council in London offers a free kerbside collection for black-sack rubbish. However, people often do not see this as fly-tipping, and it is very difficult to change their behaviour. No amount of education seems to work.

I thank the hon. Member for securing this important debate. The Environment Agency found that 86% of farmers have been affected by fly-tipping this year. However, many of those incidents are not reported because the reporting process is time-consuming, confusing and frustrating, and it does not stack up for farmers to do it. So they clear the waste themselves. Does the hon. Member agree that a single reporting mechanism needs to be developed to help farmers and land managers? I appreciate that the hon. Member is leading a very urban debate, but I think that the mechanism is important. A single mechanism should be in place so that a fly-tip should have to be reported only once.

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. As she has said, Ealing Southall is certainly not a rural area of the country. However, my father’s family are from Tipperary, and they were farmers; I do appreciate, and am well aware, of the cost of fly-tipping to farmers in particular. As it is on private land, they are, in most cases, liable for the costs of removal themselves. It is a massive issue, and I do hope that we will hear from others today on that issue. Certainly, there is more that we can do on reporting because, as I said earlier, the reports that we currently have are only the tip of the iceberg as a lot of communities just do not report.

Having gone through the problems and realised that the solutions are complex, what solutions do I feel should be included in the national strategy? To combat the organised criminals, we need a national fly-tip investigation team. Why should environmental crime not be taken as seriously as other types of organised crime? We need national financial investigators who can use proceeds of crime laws to go after the assets of these criminals and hit them in their pockets, where it really hurts.

We also need sentencing guidelines to be reviewed so that the courts do not continue to allow fly-tippers to get away with it. We need to reform the waste carrier licensing scheme so that it is worth the paper that it is written on. We need stronger rules for bins when houses are broken up into flats; I am delighted that Ealing council is introducing a new requirement for planning permission for HMOs—houses in multiple occupation. But we need to ensure that waste facilities are rigorously assessed as part of landlord licensing schemes and before permission is given for flat conversions, and that councils have the funding to carry out those inspections.

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and for the progress she is making on such an important topic. Keep Manchester Tidy established a partnership with Manchester city council to encourage residents to actively help make their communities cleaner. As part of that strategy this year, Manchester saw its highest number of volunteers supporting the national Great British Spring Clean, with more than 100 litter-picking events and more than 2,000 litter-pickers. Will my hon. Friend join me in thanking all the volunteers who work extremely hard to make our communities cleaner and greener? Does she agree that they should not have to do this in the first place?

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I certainly agree that the work of local volunteers is hugely beneficial in preventing this problem from being even worse than it is at the moment. I know that, in Ealing, we would not survive without the work of our great friends in LAGER Can, and it sounds as if my hon. Friend has similarly civic-minded residents in his constituency too. I congratulate them on the work that they have done.

The most obvious answer to the fly-tipping crisis is to reduce waste in the first place. Let us turn off the tap of all of the waste that we see on our streets. That could be a real game changer. I know that the Minister has already committed to introducing a deposit return scheme for drinks containers by 2027 that would mean that empty cans and bottles could be returned to shops to get a deposit back. As well as cutting down on empty cans and bottles in black-sack fly-tips, research by Eunomia found that a return scheme could save councils in England up to £35 million annually. We could then spend that money on something else.

I hope that the Minister will consider the merits of a scheme that covers all reusable containers, including glass, from the outset, and it would be useful if she laid out a timetable for bringing that forward. Manufacturers should contribute to the costs to councils of clear-up by providing more take-back services so that people can hand in old furniture and mattresses when they buy new ones. The big prize is to persuade manufacturers to make their goods fully recyclable; the best way to do that is to make them pay for the cost of disposal. That is based on the idea of making the polluter pay. I hope the Minister will also set out a timetable for that approach, known as extended producer responsibility. It will encourage manufacturers to stop producing so much packaging and items that cannot be easily recycled.

Fly-tipping is not a low-level crime. It stops people from feeling proud of where they live, it encourages other crime and antisocial behaviour, and it costs millions of pounds to clean up—money that could be used for vital public services. I look forward to the Minister giving my constituents in Ealing Southall confidence that, after over a decade of inaction by the Conservatives, this new Labour Government will finally take fly-tipping seriously, with a national fly-tipping strategy, stiffer penalties for the culprits, and ways of reducing waste in the first place.

If a Member intends to catch my eye in the debate, they must be on their feet now. I will impose a time limit of five minutes.

Fly-tipping sounds faintly amusing but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) so expertly pointed out, it costs millions and blights lives. A constituent wrote in about how, on a daily basis, he sees stuff—including “gas canisters” and “rotting food”—

“blown all over the street after foxes have”

opened bags. He says, “It’s relentless and tiring” and that something needs to be done. Another constituent posts daily Facebook pictures of a dump where there are all sorts of things—dining chairs, a sofa, a divan bed, a TV in bits and decorators’ leftovers. She says it

“looks like a flat clearance.”

The most recent figures we have show that, in 2023, fly-tipping cost councils hundreds of millions of pounds and that there were over 1 million incidents. As has been stated, there are a lot of logistical issues. Fran, who volunteers with the aforementioned group LAGER Can, says that the overlapping, different fly-tips in her street have created a sort of illegal, unofficial dump. Even once it is cleared, it reappears because the cycle continues. One email to me says:

“the council should figure out who keeps doing this and should come down hard on them with big fines.”

As was pointed out, fly-tipping is a criminal offence under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. It can result in imprisonment, unlimited fines and even being deprived of rights to the vehicle used to commit the offence. However, as my hon. Friend said, there is a perception that this is low-level stuff, and the likelihood of being caught is low. People are unaware that leaving items in the street, or outside a charity shop, is an offence.

Solutions should combine carrot and stick. The attitude to fly-tipping should be that it is completely socially unacceptable, and we should treat it more seriously as a crime, enforcing penalties and punishment. However, we should also make it as easy as possible for people to dispose of waste. It is not rocket science that since the Acton dump closed, the prevalence of mattresses on street corners in the area has exponentially risen. Alternative sites at Greenford or out of borough on the north circular are further away, necessitating more emissions. Sites also require pre-booking, with a lot of intrusive personal details—inside leg measurement, hat size. As a small Asian woman with a car, I know that dumps are often not the most user-friendly places, so let’s make things easier. People are not allowed to take a neighbour’s items, and items cannot be walked in either. That fails to understand that not everyone in a street will possess a car.

When I went to Germany 35 years ago, there was one day a month—towards the end of a month, as it happened—when the rubbish removal people would come around and take away big items. So those who lived in a flat or who did not have a car, or who had any of the problems just described, did not have to think about how to get rid of their mattress. Has the hon. Lady considered that option?

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point, and the idea of the community skip, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall raised in her speech, sounds like a good one. Why not take the solution to the people, rather than expect it from them? We know that all our local authorities are cash-strapped, so I wonder whether the Minister might propose a trial and give that idea a whirl everywhere, because it is free. I now have two boroughs in my constituency—Hammersmith and Ealing—and bulky items collection is at a charge. When I suggested the community skip, I was told, “But it would fill up with builder’s waste.” Great! Surely that is better than having it on every street corner. When I put to an officer the idea of CCTV, which I had received from people who email in with solutions, he answered:

“In order to carry out the sort of enforcement your constituent is asking for with cameras, we would need an infrastructure and network the likes of which one finds in novels by George Orwell.”

There is literally a “computer says no” attitude that comes back. Let us be a bit more creative.

Local councils battling this torrent of fly-tipping tend to deploy CCTV, but it then takes people to watch the CCTV to find the culprits. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should give councils the funding to staff that CCTV surveillance but also make use of the footage, such as by creating an online wall of shame, as we did in my previous council? That might put that footage to good use.

It sounds like a panacea, but we do not know who these people are, so there are a lot of issues. But yes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall pointed out, having more funding from central Government would be great after 14 years of cash-strapped councils. If we get rid of the booking system, the possibility of spontaneously mowing the lawn and taking the waste down to wherever would also be opened up.

I think we are running out of time and there are lots of Members present, but I want to praise LAGER Can and Kathy Swift on tirelessly doing community clean-ups. It terms of the necessity of having such groups, it is a bit like food banks: the fact that we have more food banks than branches of McDonald’s in this country is really a sign of state failure. It should not be Kathy who is cleaning up every unofficial dump in a borough of 360,000 people.

This has been a great debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall. Let us install some community pride in areas, because well-maintained areas are less likely to become hotspots for dumping. I hope our suggestions do not fall on deaf ears. In a similar way to the Jubilee 2000 debt campaigners, let us make fly-tipping history.

Order. I remind Members that giving way eats into the time of those who want to speak later. I call Jim Shannon, who has four minutes.