The most common fly-tip is a black bin bag of household rubbish at the side of a main road
Do you know the difference between littering and fly-tipping?
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) is the largest farming organisation in the UK, representing around three-quarters of the full time commercial farmers of England and Wales. The NFU champions British farming and provides professional representation and services to its members. It offers solutions to society on the quality and security of food supplies, the management of the countryside and the mitigation of climate change.
Fly-tipping on a private farmland is a serious problem for the NFU’s members. It is a nuisance, has the potential to pollute watercourses and to contaminate land and it can also be a danger to grazing livestock. Farming and land management is an industry that faces ever-increasing financial pressures and the NFU believes it is unsustainable for landowners to have to continually bear the costs of cleaning up illegal waste. The NFU therefore continues to lobby and campaign for more support to be made available for farmers who are the victims of fly-tipping. While we recognise there is no simple solution to fly-tipping, the NFU has been calling for a programme to address the root causes of the problem for some time now. We have always argued that ensuring resources are available to the enforcing authorities, building on existing frameworks for tackling crime, looking at availability of waste facilities and services for businesses and raising awareness amongst householders and the general public would go some way to preventing the problem. Currently the NFU is involved in a regional initiative to pilot a recording system for fly-tipping incidents taking place on private land in the West Midlands region.