Waste Enforcement (Fixed Penalty Receipts) (Amendment) (England and Wales) Regulations 2023

By improving their enforcement capabilities, councils should be able to catch more perpetrators and deter others from offending, which should lead to cleaner streets, parks and the wider countryside. Enforcement functions could include employing more officers, investing in CCTV and signage and improving the use of data. Clean-up functions can include collecting and disposing of litter and fly-tipping, and restoring land which has been harmed. The instrument also retains the Secretary of State’s ability to make provisions by legislation in future on how local authorities in England use their fixed-penalty receipts.

Although this new ring-fence will apply to councils in England only, the instrument does include consequential amendments relevant to Wales to ensure that no changes are made to how local authorities in Wales can spend fixed-penalty receipts.

The instrument also makes consequential amendments to the Local Government (Structural Changes) (Further Transitional Arrangements and Staffing) Regulations 2009 to ensure that arrangements pertaining to the merging of authorities in England are not affected. Consequential amendments are also made to the Littering From Vehicles Outside London (Keepers: Civil Penalties) Regulations 2018, meaning that no changes are made to how authorities can spend income from these civil penalties.

In conclusion, this instrument will ensure that all councils in England reinvest the money they make from those fines into expanding or improving their enforcement functions and cleaning up the consequences of this anti-social behaviour. This should help deter people from harming our public space and make it more likely that those who do so face the consequences. I hope noble Lords will support these measures and their objectives. I commend these regulations to the Committee.

I accept that there is an inevitable cost to local authorities and the Environment Agency in finding the perpetrators and, for public land, removing this material, but we are missing the fact that most fly-tipping is increasingly on private land. I would like to understand why it was excluded from this. If we are to go down the path of people individually trying to apprehend perpetrators on private land when they are in the middle of a crime, that will bring inherent dangers and I am sure the Government do not wish to encourage it. In the instance to which I referred—I cannot remember which part of the country it was—they apprehended the perpetrator and he was brought to book. The police attended and criminal charges followed.

I applaud everything that the Government are doing to make these regulations, firm up government policy and make sure that the receipts are ring-fenced, but the weakness is that most fly-tipping is on private land and we seem to have left that out.

Subsection (7) of new Section 95A inserted by Regulation 3 inserts:

“The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision … about what an authority must do with its fixed penalty receipts pending the use of those receipts for the purposes referred to in subsection (3) or (4)”

Subsection (8) states:

“The provision that may be made under subsection (7)(c) includes (in particular) provision for the payment of sums to a person (including the Secretary of State) other than the authority”.

It is clear that central government does not trust local government to conduct its waste-collection functions effectively or to have the best interests of its communities at heart. As we have local elections coming up in part of the country in May, I wonder how many political leaflets will say, “If you vote in this election don’t be surprised if we are unable to carry out any of the usual services you expect of local councillors, as central government is continually putting extra duties and restrictions on the way we can operate”. This is nothing more than a tax to be collected by local authorities and paid to central government.

The Explanatory Memorandum tells us that the SI will

“add a new list of qualifying functions for local authorities in England”.

This should, allegedly, mean that more enforcement will take place, resulting in more fixed-penalty receipts, which would reduce incidents of fly-tipping and function as a deterrent. The logic appears fine, but it takes no account of “first find your fly-tipper”. I will share with the Committee an example of the way in which illegal fly-tippers operate, although I am sure everyone is aware of this. Last autumn, as I went to the GP surgery for my Covid booster, I had to negotiate a huge pile of what looked like cedar tree prunings in the middle of a junction in the road. This was at 9 am in the morning. By the time I came back 40 minutes later, council employees were there with a truck clearing the mess away, and I stopped to speak to them. They confirmed it was likely to be fly-tipping by an operator who had persuaded a householder that they were a legitimate contractor who could do some work for them but who was, in fact, an operator without a licence. There was, of course, nothing on the pile of tree branches to indicate who the culprit was.

I am afraid that restricting what local authorities can spend their fixed-penalty revenue on is not going to prevent fly-tipping. A wholesale campaign to alert the public to the fact that everyone who removes waste from a property or business must have a licence to do so, and that they should ask to see it before parting with money, is really the only way to reduce fly-tipping.