Hoad’s Wood is a sad symbol of Britain’s fly-tipping scandal

The roads around Hoad’s Wood are typically quiet, used mainly by residents of the nearby villages and hamlets west of Ashford, Kent. So when trucks began rolling in last summer and dumping lorry loads of waste into the ancient woodland, it did not escape the notice of Yasmin and John, who are in their 70s and own around 36 acres of the site. 

As a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) it is a criminal offence to cause environmental damage, so the couple expected swift action when they alerted the authorities. 

Instead they watched as, over the next six months, lorries made hundreds of journeys into the site. “Every half hour we would see one going, one coming back,” says Yasmin. “We warned everyone we could think of.”

It soon became clear that what was being created was a commercial scale illegal landfill. Thousands of tons of milled and processed rubbish that may have come from homes and businesses hundreds of miles away was dumped and is now creating an environmental catastrophe in a precious habitat. 

The site was eventually shut down in January, after TV cameras caught one of the lorries in action and the Environment Agency swiftly set up concrete blocks and warning signs to keep the tippers at bay.

But the desecration of this mixed wood that contains oaks, hornbeam, sweet chestnut, hazel and holly, and which has been in continuous existence since at least the 17th century, raises questions about the capacity of the country’s environmental and rural crime agencies to carry out their most basic task: the protection of our valuable countryside. 

Yasmin and John were just two of several people The Telegraph spoke to who said they reported their concerns about the lorries to environmental agencies and the police, with no apparent result for several months. In response to a report of what they believed to be soil being dumped in the area, Yasmin and John were told by the council in July that it was already aware and was “investigating the matter in conjunction with other agencies”. 

In November, John was told that the local MP Damian Green was “aware and is dealing with it”. They were also separately told that “the Environment Agency was aware of the illegal waste tipping which is taking place at Hoad’s Wood and are leading the investigation with help from partners such as Natural England, Kent Police and the Forestry Commission and they have an on-going investigation”. 

“Apparently it is a very bad situation”, he was told, and “the Environment Agency was aware of the illegal waste tipping which is taking place at Hoad’s Wood and are leading the investigation with help from partners such as Natural England, Kent Police and the Forestry Commission and they have an on-going investigation”.

The Environment Agency attended the site to assess it along with the police, but it wasn’t until January that they applied for a Restriction Order which blocked access to the site for six months.

All those The Telegraph spoke to said they were afraid to reveal their real names for fear of reprisals from the individuals who have carried out what appears to be organised, large-scale waste crime.

Premeditated actions

“This clearly wasn’t opportunistic, but premeditated and the work of organised waste criminals,” says Jacob Hayler of the Environmental Services Association, which represents waste and recycling companies. He points to “the comprehensive, systematic nature” of the dumping as signs of organised criminality. 

“The volume, the quantity, the fact that it was clearly premeditated, taking place over a prolonged period of time with huge numbers of vehicles and enormous quantities of waste.” 

“The approach was to gather evidence over a six-month period while that pile of rubbish got bigger and bigger and bigger,” says Steve, who lives half a mile from the wood with his wife and son.

“But these are fully laden, 32-ton trucks driving in twos and threes down the lane, from seven in the morning until 5pm, at probably a minimum of 30 loads a day. To gather enough evidence is going to take a day, maybe a week. It was left to go on for five or six months.” 

Even from afar, the smell that drifts off the landfill is enough to make you retch, an undulating mixture of the familiar eggy waft of hydrogen sulphide, rotting organic matter, and something almost sickly sweet. 

Step back and you might almost think these are strange banks of soil, which appear 25ft high in some places, with hornbeam and ash trees seeming to sprout out of them. 

But images from up close taken before the site was closed make it clear that this is rubbish that has been through some kind of industrial shredding process. 

Among the mulch are the signs of household waste: a Wotsits packet, bottle caps, vapes, bits of old plates and a torn corner from a copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Fungi grows in the spaces between.

Seen in images from above, the scale of the site is stark, some four or five acres of stripped woodland that has been replaced with rotting waste. “It is a nightmare,” says Yasmin.

The value of an ancient woodland is not so much in its trees, which come and go, but rather in the build-up of a precious eco-system of flora and mycorrhizas in the forest floor.

“That’s the irreplaceable bit,” says Ian Rickards, of the Kent Wildlife Trust. “It’s the soil that is the heart of the woodland, and it’s that which has been pretty badly damaged in Hoad’s Wood.

“We’re talking about a 1,000-year cycle to get them into those sorts of conditions again.”  

Just metres from the site further into the wood, it is clear what has been lost, as a mossy carpet of woodland and the first signs of bluebells and wood anemones stretches out.

Natural beauty

Hoad’s Wood is home to deer, dormice and other small mammals, as well as a variety of birds, including great tits, chaffinches and dunnocks, and in the summer will welcome nightingales and blackcaps. 

“Animals will root around on the edge of this stuff, picking up plastic and ingesting it, so it gets into the food system,” says Rickards. 

Operators of official landfill sites are required to construct them in a way that mitigate their environmental risks, including comprehensive hydrogeological risk assessments. 

The sites are lined either with engineered clay several metres deep or strong plastic, that will prevent waste and liquids escaping into the surrounding soil and water. 

They also include pipework, pumps and abstraction chambers to tap and remove leachate and move it to treatment and collection facilities.

In Hoad’s Wood, conservationists fear what the impact of chemical leachates and heavy metals might be on the nearby watercourses and the groundwater in the entire catchment.

Tributaries here feed into the River Beult, which extends into the Medway. Locals report seeing ditches bubbling with a “pongy” gas. 

“You can see ponds on top that are green and yellow,” says Francis, a member of the local community.

Landfill lawlessness

Puddles on top of the landfill are an inky blue, others are petrol-coloured or even black, he says. The landfill also seems to invite lawlessness, encouraging more fly-tipping in the surrounding woodland. 

The UK sends some 14 million tons of waste to landfill every year, which since 1996 has been subject to landfill taxes designed to encourage recycling and re-use. But the waste industry experts fear the tax, charged at around £100 a tonne at a landfill site that brought in £626m in 2021 for HMRC, has instead encouraged organised criminals to proliferate. 

Landfill tax receipts peaked in 2014 at £1.2 billion and have been on a steady decline ever since. (At the same time recycling rates have plateaued at around 44 per cent.) 

The Government estimates its landfill tax gap to be around £150 million a year – that represents some 1.47 million tons of waste that has avoided the tax by being dumped in places like Hoad’s Wood. 

In 2016, Sir James Bevan, the then-head of the Environment Agency, said waste crime was the “new narcotics”, attracting criminals because it is low-risk and high-reward. The cost of the landfill tax will be included in any contract paid out by someone seeking to get rid of waste, so avoiding it by dumping can be highly lucrative. 

The volume of waste at Hoad’s Wood alone could be worth more than £700,000 in avoided landfill tax, says Jacob Hayler of the ESA. 

“We’ve seen so many cases like this over the years,” he says. “We have had thousands of tons of waste on to fields, baling them up and disguising them as silage.” 

Opaque supply chains

Increasingly opaque supply chains make it difficult for waste producers – that’s you and me and the businesses we use – to know where the rubbish they create ends up. 

A business could hire a legitimate organisation to pick up its waste, which may be passed on to another organisation who processes it into the kind of fine mulch that can be seen in Hoad’s Wood, and then passes on to another who will be responsible for sending it to official landfill. Somewhere along the way, criminals get involved. 

“Every business has a duty of care to ensure that its waste is dealt with properly. But it’s really weakly enforced,” says Hayler. Under the duty of care, businesses must demonstrate that whoever took away their waste had a carrier’s licence. But these are so easy to come by that in 2017 an environmental consultant successfully registered his dog with one.

“At any point in the chain if there is a weak link and someone who decides they want to do something dodgy, then the regulatory oversight is just too distant to be able to to enforce,” Hayler said. 

Places like Hoad’s Wood are appealing because they are out of the way, and owned privately mostly by individuals who do not live locally, and may not even know they own it. 

Family haven

Once a haven for families to escape for the weekend, over the years the wood has attracted a steady stream of criminality, culminating in 2021, when the body of Sarah Everard was discovered on a plot of the wood owned by Wayne Couzens. 

Despite the levels of criminality involved in waste, it is the Environment Agency that is responsible for policing it, but nobody within the legitimate waste industry believes it is capable of cracking down on the level of organised crime that has proliferated. In 2020 the BBC found that the number of incidents of large-scale fly-tipping had more than doubled since 2012.

In 2019, Bevan promised “targeted ‘Al Capone-style’ prosecutions” would be coming forward to crack down on organised crime gangs linked to drugs, firearms and slavery that he said were involved in serious organised waste crimes. That crackdown has yet to materialise, says Hayler. 

The EA has been stripped of much of its enforcement capabilities in recent years, having had its budget slashed 50 per cent since 2009. At the same time it has come under pressure to deal with other rising environmental crises, including the pollution in our rivers. 

“The agency is under-resourced for dealing with this,” says Hayler. In 2022-23, the agency closed down more than 400 waste sites, but said there were another 400 still active, including 174 considered to be high-risk. “Still we think the number of illegal sites in the country is probably an order of magnitude bigger than that. And every time they get stopped, new ones get opened,” he adds.

Ongoing investigation

An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We’re leading an ongoing investigation into the alleged illegal tipping of commercial waste at Hoads Wood, with support from Natural England, Forestry Commission, Kent County Council and Kent Police Rural Task Force.

“We are initially targeting those who deposited the waste to clear the site, and investigating a number of individuals and companies“. 

“We are also assessing the nature, volume and potential environmental impact of the waste on local air and water quality, and will consider enforcement action as required.” 

“This is an example of deliberate trashing of a valuable and much-loved landscape. I share the residents’ concerns that it should be cleared up as soon as possible,” Damian Green told the Telegraph.

For locals and owners of the land in Hoad’s Wood, the focus is now on getting the site cleared and there is scepticism that those responsible will ever be held to account. They have set up a campaign group, Rescue Hoad’s Wood (rescuehoadswood.org), and are hoping a petition will force authorities to act. But there are also continuing questions about how it got to this stage.

“It’s almost like they were allowed to get as much as they could on the site, before they were stopped,” Francis says. “You look around and think how on earth were they allowed to do this?”