Flytipping is caused by landfill tax

The latest outrage:

Fly-tippers have dumped a "grotesque" mountain of waste in a field in Oxfordshire.

The "environmental catastrophe unfolding in plain sight" is up to 150m (490ft) long and 6m (20ft) high and has appeared on a site between the River Cherwell and the A34 near Kidlington.

Calum Miller, Liberal Democrat MP for Bicester and Woodstock, has raised the issue in Parliament, saying it was "threatening an environmental disaster".

He also said Cherwell District Council had estimated the cost of removing the waste would be greater than its entire annual budget.

"This is not a licensed waste site and we can just see the quantity of waste that has been dumped here, that's illegal, so it's criminal," Mr Miller said, calling it "pollution on a grotesque scale".

"That's not something that local residents and taxpayers can afford."

He says "criminal gangs are dumping waste on this scale" across the country and it will take government intervention before pollutants "leech out" into local rivers.

It’s leach, by the way, not a blood sucking slug.

But why are these evil people doing this evil thing? Because incentives matter, obviously. As we’ve pointed out before:

We’d also suggest that more thought is required about the basic problem. Britain does not have a shortage of holes in the ground. It is still true that we extract more - gravel, sand and so on - from the Earth than we have waste to put back into such holes. Our only shortage is of holes licensed to take such waste - something fairly easily solved by a few bureaucratic signatures.

Yes, yes, there’s all that about recycling everything and saving precious resources. But all of this is about things that we already all agree aren’t going to be recycled. That they’re valuless is why people are dumping them. The reason people dump them on verges and fields is because we’ve - wholly artificially - made it expensive to put them into appropriately licensed and monitored holes in the ground. Make that last cheaper - kill the landfill tax, beat up local councils into relaxing rules about taking stuff to the dump and so on - and more will be properly landfilled and less littered across the countryside.

Incentives matter, d’ye see? No, really:

This is just simple economics. Raise the price of something and people will do less of it. And, quite obviously, more of something else. Raise the price of disposing of waste at the council dump and more people will flytip. There is no mystery as to what is happening here

By definition all of this waste is being put onto lorries before it is put somewhere. The only thing we’re trying to do is make sure that the somewhere is the right place. A landfill, not a field by the Cherwell. The landfill costs £100 a tonne and up, the field by the Cherwell nothing plus some vague risk of being talked to sternly by Plod.

Incentives matter, d’ye see? The cost of the field by the Cherwell is lower which is why the lorry loads go there and not to the landfill. Make the landfill cheaper - free without that risk of Plod - and the rubbish will go into the landfill.

So, do not charge the landfill tax and abolish flytipping. Because, d’ye see, incentives matter?

Of course, much of this waste being flytipped is plastics which we should probably turn into something of positive value by allowing it to be burnt for the energy contained in what are, after all, hydrocarbon derivatives. But let’s not try to explode too many heads in the one day.

The solution to people doing the bad cheap thing is to make doing the good thing cheaper. Thus people will naturally do the good thing - incentives matter, d’ye see?

Tim Worstall