River Cherwell: Clearing Illegal Waste - 6th January 2026

16:30 Calum Miller (Liberal Democrat)

People who play by the rules—who dispose of their own litter carefully and take their household waste to council-run tips—are rightly appalled that gangs are doing this and, too often, getting away with it. I know that it is less of a surprise to the Minister, who has been working on these issues for some time. She will know that the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee, led by my noble Friend Baroness Sheehan, has been critical of the Government’s response to its inquiry and recommendations of October 2025. I do not intend to cover those points extensively, but I want to highlight three that directly reflect the experience in my constituency.

Secondly, it is clear that the Environment Agency is grossly under-resourced to tackle waste crime. When I first raised this case in the House with the Minister on 13 November, she said that the budget for waste crime enforcement had been increased by 50% this year. That took the budget to £15.6 million, yet as this case shows, the costs of clearance can be close to that full amount. At the same time, the Treasury received £486 million in revenue from landfill tax in 2004-05. Have the Government conducted an assessment of how much additional landfill tax revenue is generated for each pound spent on tackling waste crime? Has DEFRA pressed the Treasury to allocate a larger share of the revenue from landfill tax to the waste crime budget? Given the Government’s response to the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee, can the Minister set out a clear timetable for the publication of the revised national metrics on waste crime and confirm whether interim reporting will be put in place while those indicators are developed?

[Source]