Fly-tipping disgrace

Fly-tipping has become a serious blight on Britain’s countryside. There are an estimated 3,000 incidents in England each day and the authorities seem powerless to fight back. The treatment of two fly-tippers caught redhanded by farmers may go some way to explaining why. The two men have been ordered to pay a little over £2,000 for four incidents of fly-tipping, a sum unlikely to deter future offenders.

It is dispiritingly clear that our government has made fly-tipping economically rational. Too many official waste centres have been closed down or reserved for recycling only. Those that remain open make users jump through endless hoops to book appointments and levy high fees, with some materials charged at more than £100 per tonne in landfill tax. This is intended to discourage landfill use, and it does. The issue is what it encourages in its place.

Fly-tipping has predictably become an appealing alternative, with the law weakly enforced when it is enforced at all. Fewer than 1,700 prosecutions were brought last year against almost 1.1 million incidents. Only 21 custodial sentences were given, and the average fine was a little over £500. Those are favourable odds for the perpetrators, no doubt boosted by the authorities sometimes choosing to sit on their hands. Hoads Wood, an ancient bluebell woodland in Kent, was buried under an estimated 27,000 tonnes of waste after warnings were ignored.

Once again, the Government has failed to grasp that criminals respond to incentives. It is a pattern familiar from shoplifting, where failing to arrest offenders has seen cases surge to record highs. The simple fact is that until fly-tippers are made to face consequences for their actions, they will continue to lay waste to our countryside.