Fly-tipping in Leeds council area: incidents, enforcement and fines

Leeds is not ranked against other councils because it counts only fly-tips reported by the public, not all incidents. The count was up 13% on 2023/24 (12,280).

Highways accounted for the most incidents in Leeds: 4,891, or 35% (England 33%). Compared with England, a larger share was on commercial or industrial land (0.8% against 0.3%) and council land (33.6% against 18.4%). The council did not identify the land type for 12% of incidents.

The most common kind of waste was other household waste, in 8,066 incidents (58%; England 44%). Relative to England, Leeds had a larger share of asbestos (0.4% against 0.3%). Hazardous waste: 55 incidents involved asbestos, 14 incidents involved clinical waste and 52 incidents involved chemical drums, oil and fuel.

Tyres were dumped in 98 incidents. The waste type was not identified for 14% of incidents.

30% were a car boot load or less (England 53%). 51% were van loads (England 43%). 2,618 incidents were the size of a tipper lorry load or larger (18.8%; England 3.7%): 1,199 tipper lorry loads and 1,419 significant or multiple loads.

The council took 14,740 enforcement actions against fly-tipping in 2024/25. The most common action was investigations (14,417, 98% of all actions; England 68%). It issued 83 fixed penalty notices (0.6% of its actions; England 8.4%): 27 for fly-tipping itself, 25 to householders who passed waste to an unlicensed carrier (household duty of care), 8 for littering alongside fly-tipping and 23 of other kinds.

9 fixed penalty notices were recorded as paid in the year. The council told Defra that its fixed penalty for fly-tipping is £300, reduced to £200 for early payment. There were 10 prosecutions, and courts issued 9 fines totalling £3,805 and 1 community sentence was given.

The chart shows fly-tipping incidents per 1,000 residents in Leeds in each year from 2020/21 to 2024/25. In every year shown the council counted only fly-tips reported by the public, so the years compare with each other but not with England. The series starts in 2020/21 because the council changed how it counts fly-tipping between 2019/20 and 2020/21, from counting all incidents to counting only fly-tips reported by the public.

Councils record fly-tipping in different ways and some have changed how they record it, so a rise or fall can reflect recording as well as dumping.

Of the 14 councils in Yorkshire and The Humber ranked for 2024/25, Kingston upon Hull had the highest rate (49.6 per 1,000) and East Riding of Yorkshire the lowest (3.0). Kingston upon Hull's count went from 6,147 in 2023/24 to 13,663 in 2024/25 while England's changed by +9%, a step that may reflect a change in how the council records fly-tipping. Leeds is listed but not ranked: ranks cover only councils that count all incidents, with 100 or more in the year.

About these figures: source, Defra, fly-tipping statistics for England, local authority table (published 25 February 2026), gov.uk. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. An incident is an illegal deposit of waste that a council dealt with or had reported to it, from a single black bag to multiple lorry loads; councils return the figures to Defra through WasteDataFlow each quarter.

Most fly-tipping on private land is cleared by the landowner and is not counted, and the largest and most organised dumping is dealt with by the Environment Agency, which is not included. Since 2019/20 Defra has recorded whether each council counts all incidents or only those reported by the public or found by its own staff. Councils that count only some incidents record fewer, so they, and councils that changed how they count during the year, are not ranked here. Sizes are recorded for the incidents a council investigated and cleared, so they can add up to fewer than all incidents.

Enforcement actions include investigations, warning letters, fixed penalty notices and prosecutions; court fine figures exclude fixed penalty payments. Rates are per resident, so council areas where many people work or visit but few live, such as central London, have high rates for that reason.

Rates use the population in Defra's table (ONS mid-year estimates). Defra's England total includes every council and its estimates for missing returns. On this page the England and region comparisons add up only the councils that count all incidents, and their enforcement figures leave out councils that returned no actions or only part of a year, as the ranks do; the chart's England line is Defra's total.