Though fly-tipping may be on the rise both nationally and closer to home, Kirklees Council has made a dent in a serious backlog.
Fly-tipping is a criminal offence where waste is illegally dumped on land, and tackling cases across the UK comes at a cost of over £100m. The issue of fly-tipping is raised time and time again in the council chamber as a source of serious concern for local councillors and their communities.
Between 1 April, 2024 and 31 March, 2025, 10,120 fly-tipping incidents were reported to Kirklees Council but only 53 Fixed Penalty Notices were issued during this period and 21 people were prosecuted in court.
Despite this, Kirklees Council says it takes a “zero tolerance” approach to fly-tipping, and now, strides have been made to reduce a significant backlog of cases. As of September, there were 1401 and now this figure has plummeted to 546. The council has also reduced its response time from 12 weeks to four weeks.
This is set out in a presentation to next week’s meeting of the council’s Environment and Climate Change Scrutiny Panel on fly-tipping and potential solutions. The local authority will be drawing up a Fly-tipping and Litter Strategy, though the time frame for this is currently unclear.
According to the meeting’s presentation, each Kirklees ward has at least one fly-tipping hotspot. Greenhead, Crosland Moor and Netherton, Dewsbury West and Newsome have been identified as having the highest number of hotspots within them. In other areas such as Dalton, only a small number of hotspots have been identified but there are “high levels” of fly tipping, with reports spread across the ward.
In terms of a comparison to other West Yorkshire local authorities, Kirklees fares better than Bradford which has a rate of 32.9 incidents per 1,000 people, but worse than Calderdale, Leeds and Wakefield. In Calderdale, there are just 6.6 fly-tipping events for every 1,000 people.
Data from 2023/24 shows that Kirklees sits slightly below the national average rate of fly-tipping. The average is 20 incidents for every 1,000 people but in Kirklees, this figure stands at 18.8.
