Orphan Sites: Hazardous Waste

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My Lords, I once asked the then president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England what he thought the Government should do about fly- tipping and littering, and he said a shoot-to-kill policy. I think he was joking, but at times, I am sort of with him in spirit. The Government have provided more funds, increased the fines for fly-tipping and increased the ability of local authorities and the police to, for example, fine people for littering from a vehicle and to accept dashcam evidence. We are serious about trying to prevent this scourge. There is an organisation which now brings different groups of people together to assist landowners, who bear the brunt of fly-tipping, to minimise the chances of fly-tipping taking place in hotspots, but also provides them, through the local authority, with funding that will catch the criminals and take them to justice.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, the cost of cleaning up hazardous waste sites can be enormous—as in the case of the sheepskin factory in Glastonbury bought by the previous RDA, where sections of land had to be abandoned. Given the extreme shortage of housing, does the Minister agree that it would be more cost-efficient to clean up orphan hazardous waste sites for new homes rather than paying to clear up newly and deliberately nutrient-polluted waterways? Given his comments on water pollution in the past, can he please explain the volte-face on this issue?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I think the noble Baroness is conflating two very different issues. What we are talking about here is orphan waste sites where the owner has in most cases gone out of business and nobody, in effect, owns them. We need a mechanism whereby an owner is found and the contaminated waste is cleared. What she is referring to is a system that has failed to unlock much-needed new housing and which has been grossly misrepresented with respect to its impact on our waterways. I would be very happy to have a longer debate with the noble Baroness on that matter.