Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to support a reduction of incidents of fly-tipping in (a) Yeovil constituency and (b) South Somerset.

Local councils are responsible for tackling fly-tipping in their area and have a range of enforcement powers to help them do so. These include fixed penalty notices of up to £1000, seizing and crushing of vehicles and prosecution action. We encourage councils to make good use of their enforcement powers and are taking steps to develop statutory fly-tipping enforcement guidance to support councils to consistently, appropriately and effectively exercise these existing powers.  We are also conducting a review of council powers to seize and crush vehicles of fly-tippers, to identify how we could help them make better use of this tool.

In our manifesto we committed to forcing fly-tippers to clean up the mess that they have created. We will provide further details on this commitment in due course.

In the meantime, Defra continues to chair the National Fly-Tipping Prevention Group through which we work with a wide range of stakeholders, such as local authorities, National Farmers Union and the Environment Agency, to share good practice on preventing fly-tipping, including on private land. Various practical tools are available from their webpage at: https://nftpg.com/