Political Editor WALTER CRONXITE on the latest instance where the MP for Croydon North has bent the rules
Hard hat: Steve Reed OBE did a round of broadcast interviews to get his fly-tipping announcement out just before elections
Steve Reed OBE, the environment secretary, has been accused of breaking strict purdah rules with his announcement of a crackdown on fly-tipping on the eve of today’s local elections across England.
Regulations already require waste operators to be licensed, and they are also subject to fines and other penalties if found to have broken existing laws.
But local authorities are under-resourced to enforce the law as its stands. Now Reed is calling for greater use of CCTV cameras, even remote-controlled drones, to track down cowboy operators who could face jail terms of up to five years.
Reed’s announcement, released late on Tuesday, has been challenged as a breach of pre-election purdah – when public resources are supposed to not be used in case they influence voters’ decisions at the ballot box.
People in many rural parts of England are going to the polls today in local, county council and mayoral elections. Many of them will have heard Reed’s message about DEFRA’s plan to seize and crush vehicles found to have been used in illegal fly-tipping.
Heard it all before: local councils already have the powers, just not the resources
Even in places where there are no elections today – such as Croydon, and the rest of London – there’s been an outbreak of “pothole politics”, with councillors and wannabe candidates posting a tsunami of images on social media of unsightly piles of black bin bags, off the back of the policy announcement from the Department of the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, where Reed, MP for Streatham and Croydon North, is the Secretary of State.
The Labour government, deeply unpopular after less than a year in office, is also facing a testing parliamentary by-election in Cheshire today – which could explain why Home Secretary Yvette Cooper made a similarly purdah-stretching announcement this week on asylum seekers.
Fly-tipping has been firmly shunted up the political agenda, with Reed doing a full round of the morning’s broadcast media yesterday, and a planted question being taken during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, too.
Townie Reed, notorious for having acquired a pair of high-end wellies as a gift from a millionaire Labour donor when he got his job overseeing the countryside in Keir Starmer’s cabinet, donned a hard hat in announcing his only-slightly new measures.
“The government is calling time on fly-tipping,” Reed announced.
“I will not stand by while this avalanche of rubbish buries our communities,” said the man who also promised to clean-up the country’s waterways.
But the Conservatives cried foul and demanded the announcement be withdrawn, claiming government resources were used to prop up Labour’s local election campaigns.
Formal complaint: Tory MP Victoria Atkins
Victoria Atkins MP, the Tories’ shadow environment secretary, said Reed’s announcement flouted Civil Service rules banning announcements that address local issues in the run-up to council elections.
“It is a clear, desperate political attempt to distract from the failings of the Labour-run council in Birmingham to clear waste,” Atkins said in a formal complaint lodged with the Cabinet Secretary.
Reed’s announcement does smack of blatant pre-election politicking: there already exists plenty of laws, licensing and regulation to deal with illegal disposal of bulky rubbish. But local authorities across the country lack the will, and the resources, to enforce those rules, and Reed’s government has done little or nothing to alter that.
The scourge of fly-tipping is one of the outcomes of 15 years of austerity applied to local authorities.
In Croydon, as first reported by Inside Croydon following a resident’s FoI inquiry, only four successful prosecutions for fly-tipping have been brought in the three years under Tory Mayor Jason Perry, while the borough has one of the worst records for flytipping in the whole country.
And thanks to Perry’s new deal with rubbish contractors Veolia, things could be about to get even worse: some residents – those living in flats above shops – are now allowed to leave black big bags on the street for collection. What could possibly go wrong..?
According to Reed, drones and mobile CCTV cameras will be deployed to identify vehicles so they can be destroyed by police and local authorities. The announcement comes following an increase in fly-tipping incidents from 957,000 reported in 2018-2019 to 1.15million in 2023-2024.
One-third of incidents involved waste dumped on pavements or roads. But there were just 1,598 prosecutions over 12 months – barely one-tenth of 1% of reported cases.
“Waste criminals and fly-tippers who blight our towns and villages have gone unpunished for too long,” Reed said.
Currently, councils have to meet the costs of storing seized vehicles while a prosecution is brought, which can often take many months. Under the DEFRA proposals, fly-tippers will have to pay all fees, as well as court fines and costs if found guilty.
Reed is pinning his hopes on the notoriously weak watchdog, the Environment Agency (which is also said to be understaffed and under-resourced for its current duties).
The EA is to carry out identity and criminal record checks on operators in the sector.
“Councils will get much more aggressive against fly-tippers and that includes using the latest technology, things like the new mobile CCTV cameras and drones to identify, track and then seize the vehicles that are being used for fly-tipping and crush them,” Reed said.
“We’re also looking to change the law so that those rogue operators who take rubbish from someone’s home and then dump it on a nearby road – they were getting away almost scot-free under the previous government. They will now be looking at potentially five-year prison sentences.”
What a load of rubbish: under Tory Mayor Perry’s new refuse deal, some residents are actually allowed to leave bin bags on the street
In Croydon, Labour’s recently selected mayoral candidate, Rowenna Davis, was quick to adopt the promised new measures as a means for highlighting the abysmal record under the borough’s Tory Mayor, Piss-poor Perry.
Councillor Davis said: “Croydon’s beautiful streets are being trashed by flytipping criminals.
“The Conservative Mayor of Croydon has let them get away with it for too long. On his watch, we have become the flytipping capital of the country. It’s a shocking and unhygienic disgrace and it’s got to stop.
“I wholeheartedly support the Labour government’s plans to increase council powers to prosecute fly-tippers. The fact flytippers will have to pick up more of the bill for this is a bonus!
“If I become Mayor, we will make the absolute most of these powers and restore our streets as sources of pride and community again.”
Croydon’s next local elections are not due to take place for 12 months.
Read more: #Binmageddon: Now Croydon named worst in UK for fly-tipping
Read more: ‘Turnip’ Steve Reed becomes the target for farmers’ tax protest
Read more: ‘I don’t think it’s helpful you ask questions like this’ squirms MP Reed
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
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