Waste experts warn London Assembly of difficulties faced by councils in tackling fly-tipping

Consumerist culture, inadequate buildings, confusing differences between boroughs and disposal costs all blamed for the problem, reports Kumail Jaffer, Local Democracy Reporter

London’s fly-tipping crisis has been blamed on a perfect storm of consumerist culture, buildings inadequate for modern waste management and confusing differences in rules across different boroughs.

Other factors include disposal charges stopping people in deprived areas from getting rid of waste responsibly, and a high turnover of residents in certain types of homes.

London has the highest rates of fly-tipping in the UK, with 481,088 incidents recorded in 2024/25 – an increase of 8% on the previous year – representing more than double the number of incidents per head than any other region in England.

Almost 60% of incidents involve household waste, according to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Earlier this month, experts and officials told the London Assembly’s environment committee that the issue was both multi-faceted and deep-rooted.

Dr Helen Holmes, senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester, said some of this was linked to deprivation in London, and that some fly-tipping was a result of a lack of accessible information rather than being done for criminal or monetary purposes.

“This includes not having the resources to pay for bulky waste collections or access to transport to move excess waste to municipal recovery facilities,” she told assembly members.

“We also have found that a lot of the time it can be linked to housing tenure and type. So it might be that it’s a rented accommodation and the landlord hasn’t provided adequate bins, or they haven’t been given the information from the local authorities to understand what the local waste rules are.

“Our research also found that it’s much more prevalent in short-term residences where there’s a high turnover of tenants, where it’s quite difficult because of that short-term capacity to engage people in the waste rules.

“Connected to that, there are language and digital issues. So language barriers, communication barriers, people might not have access to the internet to be able to look up what the local authority rules are.

“There’s really a quite a variety of things that interconnect into that deprivation that need to be considered when thinking about that social context and why fly-tipping has maybe been high in socio-economically deprived areas.”

Dr Holmes suggested that London’s concentration of residents and buildings can result in less space for easy waste disposal.

She added: “We’ve got high-density housing, tightly packed streets, homes without any outdoor space where bins may be able to go or homes which you have communal waste spaces where it’s very difficult then to manage what goes in those bins; and contamination can be can be quite high with wrong items in the wrong bin.”

Dr Anna Scott, director of services at Keep Britain Tidy, said this density is combined with “properties that are of an age where they weren’t built for modern waste management”.

This, she said, “breeds more waste” as people already see litter on the streets.

Dr Scott also suggested that modern consumerism was partly to blame, especially because it has not been paired with an efficient recycling and reuse system.

“There’s an inefficiency in the system when items are fly-tipped,” she said.

“People have access to more stuff than ever before, people want to get rid of stuff quickly, and fly-tipping is a by-product of how we don’t manage our waste well in this country. These are items that could have been reused, recycled, had a better destination than being left on the street.”

Even when households are keen to get rid of their waste in a responsible manner, the cost barrier may be too high, according to Barry Russell, a regulated industry environment manager at the Environment Agency, who said avoiding such pay-outs was a “very significant” reason in the uptick of illegal sites.

“It could be hazardous waste, which is very expensive to get rid of,” he said. “The avoidance of those disposal charges are certainly up there as one of the big reasons why we’re seeing an increase in illegal dumping.

“Construction, demolition, garden clearance, house renovation projects can increase and generate substantial waste. And when the costs for those disposals with the local householder are high, they will look for cheaper routes to get rid of that.”

London is still suffering from a lack of enforcement against increasing organised waste crime, however. Panellists told the London Assembly that over a third of illegal dumping at scale is caused by serious and organised criminal gangs running sophisticated operations.

“The perception of the risk is low,” Russell said. “It’s previously been described as a new narcotics in terms of the money that there is within illegal waste.

“The perceived risk is very, very low to those involved with it. There’s little chance of being caught and weak penalties.”

Ministers have recently brought in a raft of reforms to tackle waste crime – including an extra £45million over the next three years for the Environment Agency and new powers to close loopholes.

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