PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
(5 November 2025)

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment she has made of the potential impact of (a) illegal waste dumping and (b) fly-tipping on rural communities.

Asked by:
Lewis Cocking (Conservative)

While no recent assessment has been made, we appreciate the difficulty that illegal waste dumping and fly-tipping poses to rural communities. We work with a wide range of parties through the National Fly-Tipping Prevention Group, which involves the Environment Agency (EA) and National Farmers Union, to promote and disseminate good practice, including how to prevent fly-tipping on private land.

We are making policy and regulatory reforms to close loopholes exploited by criminals - fundamentally reforming the waste carriers, brokers and dealers system, tightening waste permit exemptions and introducing digital waste tracking. We have increased EA’s budget for waste crime enforcement by over 50% this year to £15.6m enabling the EA to increase its frontline criminal enforcement resource in the Joint Unit for Waste Crime and area environmental crime teams by the equivalent of 43 full-time staff.

We encourage local authorities to make good use of their enforcement powers which include prosecution. On conviction, a cost order can be made by the court so that a landowner’s costs can be recovered from the perpetrator. We are also reviewing local authority powers to seize and crush vehicles of fly-tippers, to identify how we could help councils make better use of this tool.

Answered by:
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