The fly-tippers turning trash into cash

0:00Coming up on the Sky News Daily with Menil Patterson, how alleged fly tippers are making a mint from dumping waste and what they had to say when we tracked them down. We believe that waste that you've been paid to remove has been dumped illegally in the countryside. Can we ask you some questions about that? About what? Fly tipping. Well, I don't do rubbish removals. You don't do rubbish removals? Have you ever fly tipped? Have you ever made money from fly tipping? No, I don't do rubbish removals. Fly tipping. It is a blight on the landscape. Councils across England reporting a million and a half incidents last year.

0:38But where there's muck, there's brass. Especially if you're not paying to dispose of the muck properly. And ultimately, it's the landowners and council taxpayers who are being stuck with the bill. Our correspondent Rachel Venables, our open source intelligence editor Adam Parker are here. Rachel, Adam, good to see you. Rachel, just start at the very beginning. How much of an issue is fly tipping? We've all seen it. It's a huge issue. And it's an issue that goes so far beyond what most people think of when they imagine fly tipping. Because if you say to somebody, I think anybody in this country, is it a problem?

1:11They'll say yes, of course it is. You know, you picture a mattress chucked at the side of a road or, you know, a load of bin bags piled up somewhere in the countryside. But what most people don't realise is that there is a criminal network behind that rubbish. Not all of the time. Sometimes it is just somebody who can't be bothered to take a mattress to the tip. But what we're seeing more and more, and this has been growing in recent years, really under the radar, is organisations, groups, individuals, whether it's just one man in a van or a serious OCG, organised crime gang, realising that there is a huge amount of money to be made from fly tipping and the dumping illegally of waste.

1:50And in essence, are they just out there advertising their services as if they were just an ordinary waste disposal company? Some of them are, yes. So some of them, as I said, one-man band on maybe Facebook or Gumtree. Sometimes we know that these people can actually just drive around with a van, particularly in big cities, places maybe where you can't have a skip. They might see somebody doing a renovation. They might see somebody clearing out an old property, offer to take it for cash, and then they'll just go and dump it. Because if they were to take it to a tip or a landfill site, they would have to pay per tonnage, you know, landfill tax.

2:21They'd have to pay the gate fee. But dumping it in a field is, for the criminals at least, free. How much money could people be making from taking away my rubbish? Hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands to, we know in some cases, people have made millions of pounds from this. And the millions of pounds is very much the really serious organised criminal gang cases. There was a case in 2017, for example, where a group were found to have made more than a million pounds by posing as a reputable company. The lower level, I suspect it's more, we're talking tens of thousands if they're really successful, maybe over time, hundreds of thousands.

2:55But it's a significant amount of money. Adam, tell us about how you got involved in this investigation, because listening to Rachel, it all sounds a bit Sopranos to me. It all sounds like Italian mafia families, waste disposal, making money hand over fist. I mean, what does it look like in this country? Well, we started the investigation with kind of a seed of an idea. And we thought, could we track the trash? Could we go to Flytips? And could we go through it, find something interesting, and basically track it all the way back? So where did you start? So we started on an app, actually, where people report Flytips.

3:32So we thought, right, let's go on that app and let's see recent Flytips that have just happened. we then went to a couple of sites and some of the sites that we went to there were some similarities they'd broken down gates some of the landowners had put kind of concrete bollards and they removed the bollards and we literally just started going through it in two of the sites that were really close to each other we had a bit of a breakthrough those people gave us it was a lot of phone calls it was a lot of traditional journalism calling people up gave us other people's numbers so the Just to be clear, again, these names, these numbers, these are of firms, individuals that are styling themselves as waste removal, but we suspect not exactly doing what they say on the tin.

4:18Very much so. I think what we found was we're talking about, you know, a van's load worth of rubbish, rubble that was sort of almost head height and a huge amount that you could walk around. And we were very careful as we went through it because we knew that this was things that had once belonged to somebody and you could see personal things in there. There was teddy bears, sheet music that a girl had clearly written her name in, you know, year nine or something on. But there was also things that because people had thrown them away, they hadn't thought to check. They never imagined it would have ended up in a field.

4:46So there were things like disability claimant details. There were parcels which had names and addresses on. And that's how we were able to contact the people whose waste this had been originally. And when we spoke to them, as Adam was just describing, they said, well, I paid this person this amount of money and here's his number to take it away. So you're carrying out this investigation, Adam. What sort of online presence do these people have? We were surprised. One of the first guys we found, we just had a name, a first name, and we bumbled around and couldn't really find anything. The second man number we were given, that number actually had on his WhatsApp, it had a full name.

5:24That full name led us to a Facebook account. That Facebook account opened up the investigation and we found the other guy on his Facebook. And we started to kind of see a network of people. And actually TikTok is where we really started to see the kind of how brash and brazen it was. TikTok, so you see, I associate that with kind of teenagers dancing more than anything else. There was some dancing videos. There was. Go on, I'm listening. There's dancing on the side of a road with a tipper truck behind to a song that, just a popular sound on TikTok. So yeah, the TikTok videos were incredible. They showed them clearing waste, they showed them working in gardens, they showed them driving around, and some of those areas we managed to locate.

6:12And that kind of helped our investigation to know that they were sort of operating in some of the areas that the flytips we found were. So you've clearly seen a few things as a result of your trawl of the internet, haven't you? One of the videos we found was the most incredible video. it was a coffin a coffin an empty coffin and in the video one of the alleged fly tippers is kind of holding it above their head using it like a sort of gym bit of equipment a few days later in a field we find that coffin or we think that exact coffin it's still empty again it's got rubbish in it but yeah, nothing worse It's unbelievable how brazen it was that we could see it online.

7:03And we had a moment where we were like, what? Wow, how have we found this? So, Rachel, we've identified one of these groups. We've identified individuals within it. Did we find them? Thanks to Adam's brilliant work, we were able to find them. And we wanted to reach out to them properly and to ask them what was going on here. Because effectively what we understood is that waste that they had been paid to remove had ended up being fly-tipped. It had ended up being in the middle of the field. So was it them who had done that? Had they given it to another third party? And we approached one of the individuals one morning with a camera, told him who we were, and we asked him some questions.

7:40How was he? He was surprised and he was guarded. He said he didn't speak brilliant English, so he rang one of his colleagues, which was another name that we had. But effectively, they just denied it. They said, we don't do waste removals, which flew in the face slightly of obviously what we'd seen on the TikTok videos and ultimately just said that they made their money from things like fencing, not from rubbish and that they never, he said at one point, I don't dump rubbish in the woods, I don't do that. Were you surprised at the surprise on this individual's face? It doesn't strike me, having watched the report, that they were expecting a knock on the door from a pair of enterprising journalists.

8:18I don't think they were easy to find in the first place. We managed to actually find where we sort of think that they live via some of their social media posts. So I think it wasn't necessarily that easy. But their videos on TikTok and Facebook would suggest that they wouldn't expect us to be there. And they were quite brazen with the content they were posting. I'm wondering, is part of the problem here that it is difficult to prove? I mean, is this a criminal act? I mean, when we are talking about fly tipping, who is ultimately policing this, in inverted commas? It's such a big issue. And the problem is there are three organisations.

8:57So you have at every location a local council. They're the ones who normally are responsible for investigating and enforcing fly tipping, if it's of a lower level. If it's a higher, much more serious organised crime level, that's when the environment agencies step in. And sometimes there's obviously a bit of a grey area between the two. And the police can get involved with both because this is a criminal matter. but often actually it ends up more in magistrates' courts which is slightly lower and there's a limit to the sort of fines that they can impose. Look, Rachel, are we thinking about this a little bit too much in the abstract?

9:27I mean, yeah, we can all picture what, you know, bucolic kind of landscape with rubbish all over it looks like but there are real-world consequences, particularly, I assume, for the landowners and for the local authorities. Yes, and for the people who's paid for this service, you know. If you paid in good faith somebody to do work, Like the builder we spoke to in this piece, Charlie, he paid somebody£300 in good faith. Somebody who had an environment agency issued waste carriers licence, by the way, he paid them to do a job. And then a few weeks later, he's getting a phone call from us and he was pretty gutted.

10:04Oh, man. Yeah, that's the best, which I believe is ours. And how does it feel to stand here to know that they've just pocketed your£300 and done this to the environment? Disappointed. Do you feel cheated? I do, I do, yeah. And somebody like Charlie faces the risk of receiving a fine himself in the post because if you pay somebody and you don't do the right checks, and in his case we think he did, but if you pay somebody who just asks for cash and they don't have a licence and they end up dumping your waste, you are also liable. But the biggest fine really is for the landowner. and in the largest site that we found, some 40 loads worth throughout this field.

10:46The landowner, I understand, has had a couple of different quotes to clear it up properly and they're reaching up to£50 ,000. So that is a huge bill that this farmer has just woken up to one morning. And presumably, given the abundance of agricultural land there is in this country, in various parts of this country, farmers are getting it in the neck as a result of this. This is a real problem for farmers. I spoke to one farmer, a different farmer, who described this as a sort of war in the countryside. Constantly, he described having to block up and unblock up their fields. And then it delays their work as well, their harvest.

11:16You know, Adam earlier described the concrete bollards. They can't just have a gate in the field. They have to have these massive concrete bollards. And sometimes, he says, people would just turn up with a tipper truck and just dump it on top of the concrete bollard. You know, it's so brazen. And it's a real problem. I'm wondering then what the solution is to all of this. Because fines doesn't seem to be working. Criminal convictions doesn't seem to be working. I mean, if people are able to make money out of this and money in the scale that you guys are suggesting, I mean, what can we do? It's all about, in many ways, it's about people understanding the issue first of all.

11:49So I think there's an argument for if you are getting rid of waste, knowing who you should be paying, knowing the sort of things that you should be looking out for. It's also, I think, about, many people would say to me, it's about resources. The scale of the problem, I mean, the waste crime survey a couple of years ago thought that this was costing us £1 billion to our economy every single year. And that's in a mixture of things like the missed landfill tax, also the cost to local councils, to people to clear it up, etc. They just sort of say that the amount of money that's going into local councils, that's going into the Environment Agency to investigate this just doesn't match the scale of the problem.

12:22In April, this new government, they launched what they've called a crackdown on cowboy waste operators. So they've taken over, they've described it as a real problem and additional powers about things like crushing flytipper vans and they wanted extra things like drones and CCTV cameras, again, to support local councils. But again, a lot of the people I speak to just say this is such a large problem. Really, that's only scratching the surface. Rachel, Adam, many thanks. Now, for more from Rachel and Adam's investigation, just head to skynews.com. The Sky News Daily is back again tomorrow.