River Cherwell: Clearing Illegal Waste

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Jade Botterill.)

It is my privilege to represent a beautiful part of England’s countryside. Stretching from the Chilterns in the east to the Cotswolds in the west, it is criss-crossed by a network of rivers that define the geography of the area. The largest of these is the River Cherwell, which flows from its origin in Northamptonshire for about 40 miles south, where it joins the Thames in Oxford. My constituency also hosts two major highways: the M40 and the A34. It is the proximity of the A34 to the River Cherwell that created both the setting and the opportunity for a major environmental crime to be committed.

In late October, I was knocking on doors in Kidlington when a conversation opened my eyes. The resident—not particularly interested in politics—was ready to close the door when he said, “Actually, my housemate Billy might want to talk to you.” He shouted upstairs and Billy came down. Billy Burnell is a local angler who knows the River Cherwell inside out. He showed me photos and videos of a vast waste dump beside the river. This was not fly-tipping—it was industrial-scale organised criminal dumping.

It quickly became clear that this was not new. Billy and others had been raising concerns for months. The Environment Agency had visited the site on 2 July with local council officers and determined it was a major incident, which the EA took responsibility for addressing. Yet local anglers, farmers and residents saw dumping continue through the summer.

What emerged was staggering: around 20,000 tonnes of waste had been dumped illegally on a floodplain beside the River Cherwell, close to the A34. You had to see it to believe it—and many people did, thanks to media coverage that went viral due to its shocking nature. This mountain of waste was one of the most serious cases of criminal dumping anywhere in the country.

We quickly had an energetic response from local councillors like Laura Gordon and Gemma Coton, and campaigners stepped up too. Environmental groups including Friends of the Thames helped to amplify the concerns across Oxfordshire and nationally. Around Kidlington, a parliamentary petition gathered nearly 1,000 signatures, which I presented here on 9 December following a series of interventions: my oral question to the Minister on 13 November, my urgent question on 17 November, the question of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey) to the Prime Minister on 19 November and my meeting with the Minister on 2 December. I thank the Minister for her engagement with this issue from the start and for her work with officials to ensure that the risks were identified and managed.

Locally, following my initial question and the media coverage that followed, the Environment Agency convened key partners from councils and emergency services to develop a strategy for the site. The agency confirmed last month that it will take the exceptional step of clearing the site itself, citing serious fire and public safety risks. This is highly unusual and entirely reflective of the sheer amount of effort and support local councillors, campaigners and activists put in to raise the alarm. It should never have been allowed to reach this scale, but this decision shows what determined local people, backed by political pressure, can achieve.

We come now to the situation today. The River Cherwell is, thankfully, not high by its winter standards, yet it still laps against the sandbags and fencing installed by the Environment Agency. Water testing has, thankfully, not shown any significant increase in chemical pollutants downstream from the site. I am truly grateful that we appear to be averting environmental catastrophe—for now. However, now that the winter trees have shed their leaves and revealed the scale of the illegal waste site, it is visible to my constituents and is a constant reminder of the damage already done and the risks ahead.

My constituents continue to ask what is being done to avert the environmental disaster of the waste contaminating the River Cherwell, and I have some questions to ask the Minister on their behalf. Have the measures to contain the waste been designed to cope with a rise in water levels equivalent to a further 2 metres—the peak recorded at the nearest EA measuring station at Thrupp in November 2024? What actions will be taken by the Environment Agency if water testing reveals that chemical pollutants are leaching into the River Cherwell? What steps have been taken to reduce the risk of fire at the site? The December decision to clear the site was warmly welcomed by all the campaigners who had fought for it, yet the factor that led the Environment Agency to authorise the clearance—the risk of fire from combustible and decomposing waste—remains.

Local people remain angry that criminals did this to our countryside and deeply frustrated that more than six months after the site was first visited by the Environment Agency, the waste is still there. The key question that my constituents continue to ask is: when will the waste be removed?

On 11 December, a press release from the Environment Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs stated that

“preparatory works for clearance will begin imminently. Further details on the timeframe for clearance will be set out shortly.”

To the best of my knowledge, no physical preparatory works have commenced, and the timeframe for clearance has not been set out. I therefore ask the Minister to tell my constituents the following. What steps have been taken since 11 December? When will a timetable for clearance be published? When will the first lorry remove waste from the site? When does she estimate the site will finally be cleared?

Finally, my constituents are concerned about who will bear the cost for this clear-up, so can the Minister confirm that all efforts are being made to identify the criminals responsible and recover costs from them, and that in the meantime the Environment Agency will meet the cost of clearance and that it will not fall to local taxpayers? Can she further confirm whether she has an estimate of what the total cost will be?

Since news broke of the illegal waste dump in Kidlington, there has been concerted media focus on the scandal of industrial-scale, criminal waste dumping up and down the country. Like many people, I had no idea it was so widespread. I have been shocked to learn of how many communities are afflicted by it. Research commissioned by the Liberal Democrats in December indicated that 20% of UK adults have witnessed large-scale illegal dumping in their own local areas, and three in five of those say that the problem has got worse in the last year. This is truly an epidemic of criminal activity that damages our natural spaces and harms the lives of local residents.

People who play by the rules—who dispose of their own litter carefully and take their household waste to council-run tips—are rightly appalled that gangs are doing this and, too often, getting away with it. I know that it is less of a surprise to the Minister, who has been working on these issues for some time. She will know that the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee, led by my noble Friend Baroness Sheehan, has been critical of the Government’s response to its inquiry and recommendations of October 2025. I do not intend to cover those points extensively, but I want to highlight three that directly reflect the experience in my constituency.

First, we need to make it easier for people to report waste crime. In this case, constituents told me that they had suspicions and even evidence in the form of number plates or a description of unusual activity, but did not know what to do with it. Should they call the council, the police, the Environment Agency? They did not know, and that stopped them from acting. Early detection of sites is key to stopping the criminals before they get started, and we should make it as easy as possible for people to report concerns. Will the Minister look again at creating a single national hotline for reporting waste crime?

Secondly, it is clear that the Environment Agency is grossly under-resourced to tackle waste crime. When I first raised this case in the House with the Minister on 13 November, she said that the budget for waste crime enforcement had been increased by 50% this year. That took the budget to £15.6 million, yet as this case shows, the costs of clearance can be close to that full amount. At the same time, the Treasury received £486 million in revenue from landfill tax in 2004-05. Have the Government conducted an assessment of how much additional landfill tax revenue is generated for each pound spent on tackling waste crime? Has DEFRA pressed the Treasury to allocate a larger share of the revenue from landfill tax to the waste crime budget? Given the Government’s response to the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee, can the Minister set out a clear timetable for the publication of the revised national metrics on waste crime and confirm whether interim reporting will be put in place while those indicators are developed?

Thirdly, in this case it is clear that the Environment Agency prioritised investigating the crime over protecting the site by containing the waste on it. Between 2 July and 15 October, the joint unit for waste crime worked to establish who the landowner was and collected evidence about the crimes. I am glad that that led to an arrest last year. However, nothing was done to anticipate the risks to the site, either from waste entering the River Cherwell or fire hazard. It was only after my question to the Minister on 13 November that work began to put in barriers to prevent the waste entering the Cherwell.

I want to be clear: the EA has worked swiftly since November to prevent further environmental damage, and working with other local partners it identified the risks of the site, which led to the decision to remove all the waste from it. My concern is that, perhaps for financial reasons, in this case the EA prioritised investigation ahead of early protective action on the site. Does the Minister think that the EA should reassess the balance between investigation and environmental protection when it identifies sites? Is the Minister satisfied that the EA has the resources and expertise to tackle serious organised criminals who are committing waste crimes, or should the National Crime Agency take over major investigations?

I did not realise that the A34 goes through the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, as it does mine—we will have to do a road trip some time. I congratulate him on his excellent speech. The Minister will not be surprised to see me here, because in Newcastle-under-Lyme we lived with the very worst example of waste crime and profit over people that was Walleys Quarry. We have just marked a year since the landfill site was closed and the cowboy operators driven out of town. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need a stand-alone strategy for waste crime and that we need it quickly?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Perhaps we can look forward to joining up on the A34 at some point. I agree that we need an approach that is truly national and truly strategic. What I have witnessed in my constituency is a piecemeal approach, with best efforts by an under-resourced agency unable to join the dots and, despite the hard work of many people within that agency, a failure to conduct, on the one hand, the investigation and, on the other hand, the preventive measures. It is clear that the estimates of the scale of the criminal activity justify a robust and fulsome national strategy. I agree with him and hope that the Minister will respond to his question.

Strange as it may seem, my constituents and I have been lucky, in so much as this site met the narrow criteria for exceptional intervention. Many communities up and down the country, such as the one just cited, also face the blight of criminal waste dumping yet do not have exceptional circumstances that allow the EA, under the current resourcing and rules, to clear their sites. The site chosen by criminals to dump waste in my constituency suited them as it had easy, undetected access to the A34, but its very proximity to the A34 became the reason that exceptional action has now been approved to remove the waste.

What has struck me most about this toxic crime is how strongly people feel it is wrong. It is wrong to be so arrogant as to despoil our beautiful countryside; wrong that too many people get away with it and that the penalties are not higher; and wrong that it takes too long to clear up these sites. When Billy told me about the site, I vowed that I would work to see the waste contained and then cleared. I am glad that that is happening now, and I hope the Minister will confirm that it will be delivered with urgency.

When I learned how widespread the issue was, I vowed to work with all those like the Minister who care deeply about it to ensure that we make real progress in stopping this crime from blighting so many communities. I look forward to continuing that work with colleagues across the House.

It is lovely to be here with you again to celebrate the new year, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wish you and all colleagues in the House a very happy new year. What a shame it is that we are starting it with the trash from last year.

As we have just celebrated Christmas and the holiday period, we will have seen our bins and recycling facilities overflowing with the Christmas excesses. We have faith in our systems that when that is taken away, it is responsibly dealt with. I therefore thank the hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock (Calum Miller) for raising this important issue. I share his anger and the public’s anger about this serious crime and its impact.

Waste crime blights our communities, as I know from my work as a constituency MP in Coventry. Waste criminals damage the environment and, in the worst cases, directly threaten our health, life and limb. These criminals also undermine legitimate businesses and deprive the Exchequer of tax income. That is why the Government are committed to tackling waste crime. We will crack down on the waste criminals and the organised crime groups who have moved into this lucrative space, and we will ensure that they are brought to justice.

I confirm that the criminal investigation into the Kidlington site is moving forward apace. Environment Agency officials, working closely with the police, have taken samples of the waste materials on site for forensic examination. There is a lot we can divine from some of these materials as to where they originated from. Those forensic results will be available by the end of January.

The Environment Agency is working closely alongside partners including Oxfordshire county council, the police and fire and rescue services as part of the site’s strategic co-ordinating group and tactical co-ordinating group. The strategic group has set the overall goals for this major incident, supporting the gold commander with advice, analysis and community links, while the tactical group implements those goals at the scene. The strategic group has local and operational expertise, and it has determined that the scale of the fire risk sets this case apart from the other illegal waste dumps in England. This location presents an overriding public imperative. That is why the Environment Agency took the exceptional decision to clear the waste and why it is working rapidly to implement a safe, systematic and focused clearance plan. It is important to stress that only two other sites have been cleared by the Environment Agency in the past five years: Hoad’s Wood, via a ministerial direction; and Twyford House in Stoke-on-Trent, where lots of flammable liquids were stored close to the west coast main line. The hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock will see some of the similarities there.

I am grateful to the Minister for sharing with the House this important step forward. We are talking about these issues going back to 2018, and it just worries me that if this had been done before, some of the issues that I have hassled her about in relation to Walleys Quarry since I was elected to this place in July 2024 could have been dealt with a lot sooner. This raises many questions about the impact on my constituents back home in Newcastle-under-Lyme under the previous Government, who were clearly missing in action. We can discuss this further outside this House.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s assiduousness on the issue of Walleys Quarry. That site is also now being run by the Environment Agency, and the risk of odour that his constituents were really grievously suffering is now extremely low, but that has come at a cost, as he rightly says.

This is nothing new. When there is a problem and no action is taken and no new policy is created, these illegal businesses think, “Well, it’s a victimless crime, so I can carry on making money.” Then they tell their friends and, guess what, soon many flowers are blooming. But they are the wrong sort of flowers, and this creates incentives. Then of course, the legitimate businesses are like, “Hang on, why am I paying all these fees if all I need to do is buy a field, dig it up and dump stuff in it?” This creates disincentives for legitimate operators as well. I am only too aware of this. It was starting post-2016 when the then Government were focused on leaving the EU and the large international issues. I was chairing the Environmental Audit Committee at the time and I was always worried about what was going to happen to waste, including chemical waste, once we put up a border with our nearest neighbours.

Secondly, we will reform waste management and transport. Instead of the current light-touch registration system, it will now be a permitted system. We will move on from a system that was so lax that people were able to sign up Oscar the dead dog to be a waste carrier. Activists were doing that back in 2018-19, so we have known about these problems. Anyone can falsify a bit of paper. We will introduce tougher background checks for operators and tougher penalties for those who break the law.

We will also require vehicles that transport waste—the man with the van—to display their permit numbers on their vehicles and on their advertising, so service users can be reassured that their waste is being handled by an accredited business rather than criminals. The reform will introduce mandatory technical competence for all permit holders, meaning that anyone transporting or making decisions about waste will have to demonstrate that they are competent to do so, rather than simply just going on a register. Waste will be managed by authorised persons only and in a safe manner.

I am fascinated and happy to hear what is being proposed. Will it be possible for members of the public to check an online database for that permit? When somebody picks something up from a house and shows their permit, people can feel quite vulnerable. Being able to go online and check the permit against the local authority or central database would give people a lot more confidence.

I will get back to the hon. Member on that, if I may. The point of a digital waste tracking system is that everything is digitised. The problem has been that it is a paper-based register, so how can people check it at the moment? My understanding is that the move is to a digital system, but I will get back to her. I do not want to mislead her or the House. Perhaps Box officials can enlighten us while I go through the third reform of the waste permit exemptions.

Thirdly, there are exemptions for three high-risk areas: end of life vehicles—that is, car scrappage—end of life tyres and scrap metal. Those exemptions have long caused problems and have been abused. We will replace them with a requirement for a full environmental permit for all those activities. We will introduce greater record keeping requirements for all waste exemption holders and impose controls on how exemptions can be managed at one site.

At the moment, there are seven waste exemptions: construction waste, preparatory treatments, treatment of waste wood, manual treatment, burning vegetation at the place of production only—that is essentially for farmers—storage in containers and storage in a safe place. As I have mentioned, we have increased the waste crime investigation unit budget. It now has 43 full-time staff.

People have often asked me about enabling the Environment Agency to use environmental permit income to tackle waste crime. Rules are set out by the Treasury in “Managing Public Money” about how the income raised by public bodies may be used. These rules ensure transparency to us as parliamentarians and ensure that fees and charges are not set higher than necessary to cover activity that should be properly funded from taxation. We instead look to innovative ideas, and the EA has consulted on the implementation of a 10% levy to generate a further £3.2 million of waste enforcement funding each year. That would enable a further 30% increase in enforcement activity to be targeted at activities identified by the EA as waste crime priorities. Those include tackling organised crime groups, increasing enforcement activity around specific areas of concern such as landfill sites, closing down illegal sites more quickly, using intelligence more effectively and delivering successful major criminal investigations.

I am grateful to the Minister for such a comprehensive response. On the question of funding, the £15.6 million in the budget this year for tackling waste crime, as she said, is for the officers who engage in investigation, but it still strikes me as a small amount of money, with 43 officers for a crime that is now taking place up and down the country. Can she clarify whether the additional £5.6 million is now permanently in that budget and will be going forward such that the additional funds she has referred to for permitting will be over and above that sum? Fundamentally, does she think that this is enough?

My aim is not to spend further taxpayers’ money on crime; my aim is to stop it happening in the first place. All budget decisions are subject to the normal business planning, but we hope that, through our three-year spending review, we can give the Environment Agency a three-year or indicative settlement that will enable it to plan, rather than the annual process of, “Up this year, down next year,” so that there will be long-range line-of-sight planning. As I say, the EA is consulting at the moment on the additional extra revenue. If that goes through, there would be a funding uplift.

I have the answer to the question from the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade): we are happy to confirm that it is already possible to check the online database for permits, so that is good news there.

I have mentioned the different reforms and I think I have answered all the hon. Gentleman’s questions. I am pretty much coming to the end of my speech. On steps taken since 11 December and his specific question about the rise in water level of up to two metres, equivalent to the peak recorded at Thrupp in November ’24, the waste is within a large floodplain that can store a substantial volume of water during heavy rain. The EA has carried out more detailed flood risk assessment to understand any changes in water levels due to the illegal waste and has determined that there will not be any increased flood risk to local properties. My understanding is that sandbags and a fence are there in order to protect the river.

The EA has also carried out regular water quality sampling of the river to check for impacts of run-off or leaching and has found no indication of pollution. If any pollutants were found in the watercourse, the action would depend on the nature and type of the pollutants found.

On fire risk at the site, EA officials have been working with the fire and rescue service, which is leading on monitoring the temperatures of the waste and planning appropriately. The fire risk was one of the main reasons that an exceptional decision was taken to progress works to clear the site entirely.

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out so clearly how seriously she is taking this issue, which will be of continued reassurance to people back home in Newcastle-under-Lyme. In many examples, waste crime is rural crime, such as in the example from the constituency of the hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock (Calum Miller) and for me back home. The Minister talks about working together—can she touch a little bit more on the importance of co-operation and partnership work with the Home Office to make sure that we are getting that right? Clearly, in many communities up and down the country, people think that they can get away with doing whatever they want in rural communities, where there are fewer people around. We have to make sure that we tighten that up quickly.

I agree with my hon. Friend. One of the things that I am very interested in exploring is what the playbook is. The hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock asked who such things should be reported to, and the problem is that if that is not clear, people do nothing. The most important thing when any crime is being carried out, wherever it is happening—whether that is on the Tube or wherever we see things happening—is for us as citizens to do something. That might be reporting it to the council, the local police or the Environment Agency, whose hotline is 0800 807060—I thank my officials for getting that through so that it is on the public record.

The playbook is important. Once something has been reported, what does the local authority, the police or the EA do? What is the definition of “major site”? I have visited sites, including Watery Lane in Staffordshire, where two vanloads of fly-tipping was not classified as a major problem, and it fell to the local authority to clear it. People were locked in their homes physically unable to leave via the road—an absolutely extraordinary position for people to find themselves in. What is the playbook, what are the definitions and where do national agencies step in?

The Environment Agency expects to fund the clearance efforts by making efficiencies in its operations, without impacting on or scaling back any other services. The EA is not funded to clear up waste sites nationally, however, and makes these types of decisions only in exceptional circumstances.

The hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock asked about additional landfill tax revenue. The waste crime survey that the EA has carried out indicates that 20% of waste is handled illegally. His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs estimates that 23% of landfill tax is evaded, contributing to an annual waste crime cost of roughly £1 billion a year, including a £150 million landfill tax gap, which is 23% of the theoretical liability—I hope that everyone can understand that. That £1 billion a year shows that this is big business. It is a profitable and lucrative business, and we are all paying. We are paying twice, because we are losing the £1 billion and then clearing up the waste, so it is a double whammy for us—it is maddening.

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out those figures so clearly. That was the point that I was driving at in addressing the budget for waste crime. It is not so much that I or anybody else wants to spend money dealing with criminals, but a relatively modest investment in detection and investigation could yield a higher proportion of that missing tax. We lose £1 billion every year, but a relatively modest increase in the waste crime unit’s budget, or the National Crime Agency doing more, could potentially bring in more of that revenue, which should be used for the benefit of all taxpayers.

I am in passionate agreement with the hon. Gentleman, as I am sure is everyone in the Chamber and watching at home. I would say, however, that big businesses use all available resources to protect their income. They are sophisticated businesses—some are registered companies—and they have their own ways of making life difficult for law enforcement. We are in a bit of a David and Goliath situation. They have been very good at doing that. This is a complex crime, and it takes a while to unravel.

We continue to work with the Treasury on the best approach to fiscal policies to tackle and reduce waste crime. The joint unit for waste crime is a UK-wide partnership, working with the Environment Agency, HMRC, the National Crime Agency, the police and others. It shares intelligence, powers and resources to disrupt waste criminals. The unit, which was launched in 2024 and uses proceeds of crime action and asset freezes, has doubled in size thanks to our extra funding. Anyone with intelligence about waste crime can report it to Crimestoppers on 0800 555111.

My message to our constituents around the country is that waste crime is an absolute top priority for the Government. My message to the waste criminals is we are coming for you and we are going to shut you down. My message to the legitimate waste operators is thank you for your work maintaining safe, healthy and clean environments in our towns and putting pride in our places. Let us all ensure that we work together to create a truly circular economy in which this sort of terrible crime is unthinkable and its perpetrators are put out of business.