Recommendation 27

Defra told us that “Local authorities have the responsibility to deal with fly-tipping” while Defra’s role is to support authorities and provide tools for carrying out this work. However, Defra’s statutory guidance presents a less straightforward picture of local authority responsibilities. Local authorities have a duty to keep specified land clear of refuse, and can be taken to court to ensure they clean up such refuse within a reasonable time.98 Investigation and enforcement are steps that local authorities can choose to take; they are not themselves duties on the authority.99 Local authorities have many different priorities to balance, and their spending on non-social care services fell by 24.8% in real terms between 2010–11 and 2019–20. The Local Government Association believes that local authorities will only recover around half their costs, even after a successful prosecution. Between 2014–15 and 2020–21, the proportion of fly-tipping incidents investigated by local authorities fell from 35% to 28%.100 In 2020–21 Sandwell and Hackney Councils recorded 24,000 fly-tipping incidents between them, issued 31 and 150 fixed penalty notices, respectively, and undertook no prosecutions.101 A submission from academic crime scientists argued that authorities could do much more with their information about fly-tipping to inform prevention.102