Fly-tipping — the illegal deposit of waste on land not licensed to receive it — has reached epidemic scale in England. In the year April 2024 to March 2025, local authorities in England recorded 1.26 million fly-tipping incidents — a 9% increase on the 1.15 million recorded the previous year, which was itself 6% higher than the year before. The trajectory is consistently and steeply upward.

Key facts & figures

  • 1.26 million fly-tipping incidents recorded by local authorities in England in 2024/25 — up 9% on 2023/24
  • 62% of incidents involved household waste — 777,000 incidents, up 13%
  • 37% of all incidents occurred on highways — the most common location
  • 52,000 large-scale incidents (tipper lorry load or larger) — up 11% — costing councils £19.3 million to clear
  • 98 large-scale, illegal dumping incidents dealt with by the Environment Agency in 2024/25
  • 572,000 enforcement actions taken in 2024/25 — up 8%
  • 69,000 Fixed Penalty Notices issued — up 9%
  • 1,377 prosecutions brought — with a 99.1% conviction rate
  • £539 average court fine — described as wholly insufficient to deter criminal operators
  • Fewer than 0.2% of incidents resulted in any court action

What is fly-tipping?

Fly-tipping is defined in law as the illegal deposit of any waste on land that does not have a licence to accept it, contrary to Section 33(1)(a) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. The specific harms include environmental contamination, public health risks, wildlife harm, and direct economic damage to landowners, councils, and legitimate waste businesses.

Who is responsible for clearance?

Local authorities are responsible for clearing fly-tipped waste from public land and handle the vast majority of officially recorded incidents.

The Environment Agency handles large-scale, serious, and organised illegal dumping incidents posing an immediate threat to human health or the environment. In 2024/25, the EA dealt with 98 such incidents. Large EA cases may involve clean-up costs of between £10,000 and £500,000 per site.

Private landowners bear the cost of clearing fly-tipped waste from their own land with no mandatory government support. Rural landowners, particularly farmers, are disproportionately affected — surveys show that over two-thirds of farmers have experienced fly-tipping on their land. Private-land incidents are almost entirely absent from the official statistics, meaning the true scale of the problem is substantially larger than the 1.26 million figure captures.

The enforcement gap

The statistics reveal a profound enforcement gap. In 2024/25:

  • 1.26 million incidents were recorded
  • 572,000 enforcement actions taken — but the vast majority are merely investigations
  • 69,000 Fixed Penalty Notices issued — just 5.5% of incidents
  • 1,377 prosecutions — just 0.1% of incidents
  • Average court fine: £539 — negligible for commercial fly-tippers
  • Only 0.2% of incidents resulted in court action

Clean Up Britain responded to the statistics calling for: minimum mandatory fines of £20,000 for commercial fly-tippers; mandatory installation of hidden surveillance cameras; and rewritten sentencing guidelines.

Organised crime and waste

Large-scale fly-tipping is frequently connected to organised criminal gangs. The Environmental Services Association has repeatedly warned that waste crime funds other serious criminal activities and undermines investment in the UK's circular economy. For the wider picture of how regulators are responding, see our guide to environmental crime and pollution prosecution statistics in the UK.

Notable large-scale sites include Hoad's Wood, Kent (June 2025), where organised criminals dumped lorry loads of waste piled up to 15 feet high. Multiple sites across England have received tens of thousands of tonnes of industrial waste with clean-up costs in the millions.

The duty of care

Every person or business that produces, handles, or disposes of controlled waste has a legal duty of care under Section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. This requires waste producers to:

  • Take all reasonable measures to keep waste safe
  • Only transfer waste to an authorised, registered waste carrier
  • Check the credentials of any waste collector they use
  • Retain transfer documentation for at least two years

Householders who pass waste to an unregistered collector can be fined up to £600 even if they did not commit the fly-tip themselves. Understanding these duties is exactly what our Environmental Awareness Training course is designed to explain, covering the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the waste duty of care in plain English for UK workplaces.

Sources & references

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Mark McShane
Mark McShane
Health & Safety Training Specialist, Online CPD Academy

Mark writes about workplace compliance, environmental regulation and accredited online training for Online CPD Academy, drawing on the latest UK enforcement data and legislation.