Government’s pledge to crackdown on illegal waste dumps is welcome but there’s a whiff of style over substance to it - Andrew Vine

Everyone in Yorkshire is familiar with the sinking feeling of coming across illegally dumped waste in a place they love, whether it is a favourite urban park or alongside a footpath through the countryside.

There’s an anger that goes with the despair at seeing a beauty spot despoiled, and a sense of frustration too that people with no thought for the environment or public safety can profit by dumping toxic waste wherever they like and seemingly get away with it.

The residents of Manningham, in Bradford, undoubtedly know those feelings only too well, since they are the victims of arguably the worst illegal dump in Yorkshire – a 7,500-tonne eyesore that filled their homes with a disgusting stench during the heatwave.

The dump, on a strip of land off Midland Road, close to Bradford City’s stadium, is emblematic of Britain’s waste problem and the criminal gangs that lie behind it.

Manningham’s people have seen lorries turning up to unload yet more rubbish, and an excavator moving it around the site. Those responsible have done so with impunity, not even bothering to try to conceal their activities, which can only be interpreted as a complete disregard for the law and a confidence that they will not be caught or prosecuted.

Let’s hope they are wrong about that and end up in court. In the meantime, the Midland Road dump is going to be cleared up as part of the government’s new crackdown on waste, which will be a huge relief for those who live nearby.

Last week’s announcement by the Prime Minister that he is going to get tough will be widely welcomed, not least because decisive action on a problem that is disfiguring the country is long overdue.

Fines for waste offences will rise from a paltry £300 to £5,000, drones will be used to track offenders, and their assets including cars and homes could be seized, with mayors spearheading action in their areas. West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester will pioneer the new regional approach.

That’s great news, except there isn’t any mention of additional money to take on the criminals responsible for the ever-growing mountain of waste, even though the government is promising greater co-operation between police and regulators, overseen by a Waste Crime Crackdown Group, chaired by environment secretary Dame Angela Eagle.

Despite the good intentions behind the policy, without additional resources for the mayors to deploy in the fight against waste it is hard to see how under-pressure police forces and the Environment Agency, which is already swamped by its workload, will be able to do more than they already are.

In his announcement, Andy Burnham talked of giving authorities “powers to hunt down the people responsible”, but such powers may lack the desired impact without extra money to make them effective.

Like a number of the government’s announcements since Mr Burnham took office, there is a slight whiff of more style than substance about the waste crackdown.

Proof that the new approach is working will only come if offenders are arrested and prosecuted. The difficulties already encountered by the authorities in Bradford in tracking down those responsible for the Manningham dump illustrate how hard it will be to get criminals into court.

Nevertheless, the government deserves credit for at least trying a new approach to addressing an area of criminality that grows worse with every passing year.

Attacking it at a regional level might work, but the involvement of the National Crime Agency in the new approach will be crucial because the problem is countrywide and crosses county lines.

One of the relatively few successful prosecutions for large-scale dumping demonstrated that earlier this year, when a London-based criminal was convicted of spreading waste across several sites in the north. Only a complex investigation at both regional and national levels nailed him.

And many more like him need to be nailed. Yorkshire is on the front line of Britain’s illegal waste scandal, its wide open spaces and stretches of sparsely-populated countryside being magnets for dumping.

Even if the new crackdown has drones flying night and day to catch those responsible, covering the whole of Yorkshire is impossible.

During 2025, our county saw a 17 per cent increase in tipping – almost double the national rise of nine per cent – which equated to more than 100,000 incidents, costing councils and landowners a fortune in clean-up costs which they can ill afford.