Farmers in the war against fly-tipping: ‘We're the victims yet we're being made to pay'

Telegraph

a day ago

A discarded cistern marks the entrance to a field in St Albans – a fitting prelude to the unwitting dumping ground beyond. Mounds of mattresses, sofas and pallets lie abandoned; an Amazon delivery bag, a doll's house and a skateboard are scattered across what's estimated to be 200 tons of waste, strewn across land intended to nourish wild birds and insects.
Though he had nothing to do with its arrival, the farmer – 80, and recently widowed – is now responsible for clearing up the £40,000 mess dumped on his doorstep.
This site in Hertfordshire is one of many making life even more difficult for struggling farmers. As custodians of the land, they are legally responsible for clearing the waste left on it – often at a personal cost of tens of thousands of pounds. 'It's an utter injustice,' says sixth-generation farmer Will Dickinson, surveying the grim scene around us on his 700-acre farm. 'The liability's on [the farmer], which is hideously unfair.' The law, he adds, seems to say: 'You're the victim of a crime – and now we're going to make you pay for it. And if you don't, we'll criminalise you too.'
His own livery backs onto the field where we meet. A few times a week, he says, local farmers call to say they have become the latest target. According to figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), there were 1.5 million fly-tipping incidents in the countryside between 2023 and 2024 – a scourge that affects two thirds of farmers, according to the National Farmers' Union (NFU).
Perhaps inevitably, Dickinson, 64, has also been a victim – once discovering five acres of cropland strewn with the contents of eight tipper trucks, including a bathroom suite and garden waste. Unsure whether the load contained asbestos or glass, he was forced to scrap the entire crop. Nothing he had planted could be harvested, dealing a further blow to food security and his seasonal earnings – all while facing an inordinate clean-up job.
Across farms in Britain, similar stories abound. In March, Eevey Hunter, an arable farmer in Hertfordshire, spent £6,000 clearing rubbish dumped in her fields over what she believes was a matter of weeks, with the perpetrators 'effectively using it as a free tip'.
Dickinson suspects that most perpetrators are 'white van men' or families who can't be bothered to go to the tip themselves. 'But this is something else,' he says of the disaster left on his elderly neighbour's land. (His terrier, who he tries to coax out of the car, wisely refuses.)
'This must be organised criminality. It's quite staggering how much waste [there is].'
Chris Traill, the strategic director for community at St Albans City and District Council, describes the incident as 'a well-organised operation, not a random or impulsive act,' adding that it is being linked to eight other large fly-tips across the district. Following investigations by the council's environmental enforcement team, 'two individuals have already been contacted and asked to attend an interview, and more people may also be approached'.
Fly-tipping is a criminal offence that can carry a £50,000 fine and, under a Government initiative launched in April, a five-year prison sentence. Yet Dickinson notes that, according to 2020 figures, 95 per cent of those caught and prosecuted received a fine of less than £1,000 (with the number of fixed penalty notices also falling by 5 per cent last year) – 'which is absolute nonsense,' he says. That amount barely covers the cost of hiring an asbestos skip, let alone the much higher recycling and removal fees farmers are left to shoulder. The environmental impact of unfiltered dumping can be severe too, contaminating water and soil and destroying wildlife and their habitats.
'I get disheartened every day,' Dickinson says of what's happening to Britain's farmland, citing one case where mountains of rubbish – later found to contain asbestos and human waste – were dumped amid the bluebells in another neighbour's ancient woodland. (The landowner was quoted £100,000 for its removal; the damage 'still sits in among the trees now'.)
He's well aware that 'if you're going to fly-tip, you don't care about the environment, you just want to get rid of [the rubbish] and make a few quid' – but the impact is proving both ecologically and financially devastating for those left to clean up.
Hertfordshire's police and crime commissioner last year launched a 'fly-tipping fund', which landowners can apply for if they have been targeted. Yet between 2024 and 2025, just seven applications were successful, with a total of £11,173 paid out.
The Government maintains it is taking the issue seriously, with a Defra spokesperson stating: 'Waste criminals and fly-tippers who blight our villages and undermine our hard-working farmers have gone unpunished for too long. This Government is cracking down on cowboy waste operators, including seizing and crushing fly-tippers' vans to clean up Britain's rural areas and support our crucial farming sector.'
In March, £800,000 in funding was earmarked for the National Rural Crime Unit and National Wildlife Crime Unit – a fraction of the £44.1 million cost of rural crime last year.
Is enough being done to change the current punitive fate of battle-weary British farmers? 'Sadly no, not at all,' says Victoria Collins, Liberal Democrat MP for Harpenden and Berkhamsted, where the most recent large-scale incident took place.
'There just seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the difficulty that a lot of our farmers have,' she says, with ministerial promises rarely translating into action. 'This is a criminal issue; this is not just something which is small fry anymore, and so that's why the Government should be tackling it head on.'
Collins's party is pushing for more reinforcements, such as dedicated teams within police forces – currently, just 0.4 per cent of officers focus on countryside offences. Without that support, farmers remain single-handedly responsible for deterring criminals. For some, that means installing CCTV, though this often proves ineffective: Dickinson says he has images of one intruder blasting his camera with a BB gun. Heavy blockades offer little protection either; his neighbour's farm had a large concrete block moved by intruders and a gate mangled.
'The reality is that when you're in the countryside, there aren't that many cameras around, and you can find secluded spots – hidden in trees, down back lanes, that nobody really knows about,' says Rachel Hallos, the vice-president of the NFU, on how easily fly-tippers are able to blight the countryside.
'It seems that once somebody's found a place, it keeps on being tipped there again and again and again.'
These incessant attacks – and the lack of recourse afterwards – are yet another blow to farmers, who have already been saddled with inheritance tax changes on land worth more than £1 million (previously exempt) and Government cuts to subsidies. In March, applications to the Sustainable Farming Incentive, launched in 2022 to reward eco-friendly farming practices supporting food production and the environment, were also closed.
This has left Dickinson in the same position as many of his peers: caught between continuing to work to stave off economic turmoil or passing his farm to the next generation much sooner to avoid a multimillion-pound tax bill. He describes the situation as 'hideous; absolutely hideous. Mental stress in farming is a pretty serious thing these days'. (An NFU report found that 96 per cent of those surveyed felt rural crime was negatively affecting farmers' mental wellbeing.)
'A friend of mine's father committed suicide; another neighbour committed suicide back in the spring. It's a dodgy old job.'
Dickinson maintains that of all the challenges farmers face today, fly-tipping is one that surely can be cracked. 'If you lose hope, you give up. I don't want to give up.' Still, he says, 'it's been a long, long war' – and there's no sign of it ending yet.