Contribution
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Sheehan for initiating this debate and for the work she did on the committee.
I will speak first as an amateur archaeologist. That seems a bit random, but I say that because our job as archaeologists is to find things such as middens: waste sites from the past. I can see archaeologists of the future specialising in these sorts of things, although I would hate to be the archaeologist who digs up the sort of stuff that we are seeing in these waste tips. That is a joke in one respect, but it is not in another, because most of these sites will never be cleared up and therefore will be part of the archaeological record of the future.
We have just had a briefing from the City of London Corporation about Epping Forest. It has two fly-tipping incidents a day, which is eating up a percentage of its budget as a charity. When I was on the train to Newcastle the other day, I counted 16 dumping sites just by looking out of the window.
I also speak as a landowner, and obviously many people would say to me, “Well, you’re a landowner, you can afford to deal with this”—but it is a real issue. Luckily, my estate is in the middle of nowhere, but even we had a lorry turn up and dump a load of rubble just in a farm entrance. Luckily, we could deal with it by laying a new roadbed, but the cost of that is frightening. It goes to a very basic rule: if it comes from the highways and over your wall, you have to pay for it; if it stays on the highway, they seem just to leave it there. That is just a personal point.
Something I find really surprising is that, if you want to get involved in this, it is an easy area to get into, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said in his erudite speech. In the time it took him to make his speech—I timed this yesterday—I could apply for a waste licence. It is a hundred quid a year if you do a three-year licence, and I could then have a waste licence to drive an articulated lorry full of waste. I do not see how it is even possible that someone can just go on a website, get that licence and suddenly legally drive around waste, without any real question about what they are doing. I understand how difficult this is, because of the amount of waste that has to be moved around the country, but, if it is that easy to get a licence, it is hardly surprising that so much of it ends up in gateways, down the back of embankments or wherever it is found.
The origins of this go back to recycling centres. You see somebody turn up with a van. Lots of jobbing builders turn up. People have to book in a van, and they can only do two trips a week, but, looking at what comes out of the van, I wonder: how much easier is it just to turn up somewhere and dump it on the side of the road? That is of course the origin of this, and the issue has grown larger and larger as we have moved forward.
I was looking it up and I was at the debate in 1996 on the Finance Bill where this was introduced. The fabulous Earl Ferrers, for those who remember him, was very positive about how it was going to work and how it would raise a great deal of money. Another issue at the time was that we had to meet the European directive and we still had the problem of closing down landfill sites, because most of them were full. We were diverting waste, and this was a way of acting as “polluter pays” and it was going to move things forward.
When I set up and ran the Anaerobic Digestion and Biogas Association, we worked incredibly hard to build up anaerobic digestion to take food waste out of the waste stream. We have been incredibly successful in certain areas. I think councils around the country should take the positive nature of that, but the fault lies with the Government. We have actually changed landfill tax into being just a tax. It has no bearing in the Treasury’s eyes on what happens going forward.
If we take landfill tax, which the TaxPayers’ Alliance says is now raising £600 million a year—I do not usually use the TaxPayers’ Alliance as a source of reference—we could then direct that into enforcement, which would solve the problem. The Government are not taking this seriously enough, but I think they will. The reason is that we just have to go back a few months to when the water companies were constantly lambasted over combined sewer overflows—CSOs. In fact, Liberal Democrats would stand next to any pipe for a photo opportunity, because it is such a good issue. I have a feeling that my friend the noble Earl, Lord Russell, will be doing exactly the same when he starts to track down the vast numbers of large sites which have not been reported on, but which are going to cause a national outrage in the not-too-distant future.