RICHARD NORTH
I don’t know who first articulated the idea, or brought it to prominence, but the person was onto a good thing when saying that one should turn off the tap before mopping up the spills from an overflowing bath.
This elegant way of conveying a profound piece of common sense is certainly one from which Crash and Burn’em could learn, and the application of the principle might have prevented him from making the usual fool of himself when he visited my neck of the wood yesterday to announce a “new crackdown” on fly-tipping.
With that in mind, he was visiting a massive illegal tip which had mysteriously sprung up, apparently unnoticed, alongside Midland Road Bradford, despite this being a main road in the shadow of the Bradford City Valley Parade football club.
The tip, we are told, is one of three additional sites where Burnham has announced that government money is to be made available to help clear them up.
The other two are Power Station Road, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent and Aymer Close, in Runnymede, Surrey, collectively thought to hold about 22,000 tonnes of illegal waste.
Welcome though this is, it is a reactive measure – the damage has already been done. And that applies to the bulk of the measures announced by Burnham, which focuses mainly on shutting down criminal gangs running illegal waste sites.
This amounts to – the government says – better use of drones, a bigger role for the police and the National Crime Agency, more Environment Agency officers on the frontline, and a steep rise in fines, all of which is hoped will deter, catch, and punish those who dump illegally.
Rogue actors who dump waste illegally or fail to treat it correctly are set to face fines of up to £5,000, up from the current maximum of £300, although that is unlikely to deter the big operators who treat illegal waste disposal as one of a spectrum of activities within the framework of organised crime syndicates.
Nevertheless, some of the measures may help but, says the BBC, opposition parties complain that illegal dumps are a small part of a much bigger issue with smaller scale fly-tipping and landfill all posing big problems for communities.
They are not wrong, and the problem of small-scale fly-tipping is now at epidemic levels. In England alone, local authorities are dealing with 1.26 million fly-tipping incidents annually, equivalent to a staggering 3,446 cases per day, or one incident roughly every 25 seconds.
The most common place for fly-tipping was on highways (pavements and roads), which accounted for 37 percent of total incidents in 2024/25. In 2024/25, the number of highway incidents was 463,000, which was an increase of 9 percent from 427,000 in 2023/24.
The most common size category for fly-tipping incidents in 2024/25 was equivalent to a “small van load” (31 percent of total incidents), followed by the equivalent of a “car boot or less” (27 percent).
The sheer scale of this “epidemic” is overwhelming any attempts to contain the problem, the scale of which increases year on year, but what is missing from Burnham’s cunning plan is anything that might address the problem at source – turning off the bath tap, so to speak.
Here, one has to step back a bit and look at the problem in the round – as well as from a historical perspective. It is fair to say that fly-tipping is, to a certain extent, influenced by prosperity – rising living standards – and in 1967, illegal or “promiscuous” dumping was seen as a significant problem, sufficient to trigger a new law, the Civic Amenities Act 1967, which required local authorities to provide free community refuse dumps, known as civic amenity sites, where residents could discard bulky waste.
The Act took a little time to settle down and problems remained for a while but, by common consent, the implementation of the Act made a significant contribution to containing a growing problem.
Although the sites were originally created for householders, as they evolved – through one of those glorious English fudges – small traders gained almost unrestricted access to them.
In the early decades, enforcement was highly relaxed, allowing traders, such as builders, and clearance businesses, informally to dump their rubbish. They often preferred visiting the local tip rather than going to heavy landfill sites or paying commercial waste firms.
Furthermore, many sites allowed informal “totting” (where site workers or visitors salvaged and resold scrap metal, wood, or furniture), making it easy for small tradespeople to blend in.
As site volumes grew, some Waste Disposal Authorities decided to formalise this inevitable demand rather than fight it. They introduced schemes where bona fide small traders could purchase a set number of commercial waste vouchers.
But then these happy informal arrangements came to an abrupt end. Firstly, triggered by the then EEC’s Waste Framework Directive, promulgated in 1975 and strengthened in 1991, the Environmental Protection Act 1990 came into force.
This introduced grotesque statutory controls on the handling and disposal of waste, the formidable bureaucracy of which made it almost impossible for small firms legally to manage waste not directly generated by their own activities – such as building waste arising from repairing a house. Even contract gardeners were caught, being unable legally to dispose of lawn cuttings.
Then, in 1996, the Landfill Tax was introduced, again predicated by EU law, as a means of discouraging landfill and encouraging recycling. Although it started low at £7 per tonne, it increased each year and now stands at £130.75 per tonne for the standard rate, on top of which tipping fees have increased massively owing to a regulatory-induced and entirely artificial shortage of tipping space.
The combination caused a massive surge in small traders trying to illicitly sneak commercial waste into civic amenity sites to avoid the tax, forcing local authorities – which also had to pay the tax – savagely to restrict access to traders, use strict permit systems, height barriers, and automatic number plate recognition cameras to block commercial vehicles, vans, and sign-written trade trucks from household recycling centres.
Most of the original community sites are now strictly guarded, available for domestic use only. And it is from this development that it is possible to explain why the bulk of fly-tipping falls into the “small van load” category.
Adopting the principle of turning off the tap, the fly-tipping epidemic would be massively reduced, almost overnight, if the bureaucracy relating to small-scale waste handling was removed (failing at the moment to reduce fly-tipping), the landfill tax was scrapped and opening up and licensing new tips was made easier, while small traders were given free access to council sites once again.
On the basis of employing carrot and stick, fines could then (and should) be massively increased with enforcement strengthened and funded from fine revenue, as was once speeding enforcement.
Relying solely on the stick, though, is a fool’s errand, yet that is exactly what Burnham is doing. With roping in regional mayors to coordinate enforcement, this simply adds another layer of bureaucracy to an already complex system which struggles to deliver results.
What we have here, therefore, is just more of Andy Burnham’s performative nonsense. The sound bites may seem meaningful, but the net effect of his initiative is likely to be minimal.
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(UKR)