Picture the gleaming skyline of Dubai, stacks of cash being moved in trucks, and pigs rooting through trash on a Lancashire farm. The connection between these scenes may not be apparent at first, but understanding it uncovers the hidden truth behind the UK’s fly-tipping crisis and the criminal enterprises profiting from it.

As authorities work diligently to pinpoint those behind what is being termed the country’s ‘largest ever’ illegal dumping incident in Oxfordshire, our investigation sheds light on the gangs thriving off this £1 billion a year industry.

Our research reveals a disturbing web of waste crime intertwined with other organized criminal activities, including large-scale fraud, money laundering, and drug trafficking.

These crime syndicates employ ruthless measures to defend their profitable schemes, often resorting to intimidation and violence against those who challenge them.

The sheer magnitude of these illegal operations is staggering. For example, one group, an Irish Traveller gang operating in the southeast, has been linked to over 100 unauthorized dumping sites.

The scale of these illicit enterprises can be vast, with one gang of Irish Travellers based in the southeast linked to at least 100 illegal tips.

And the criminals driving the trade are no longer ‘one man with a van’, but serious operators employing accountants, drivers, transport managers and corrupt insiders.

They include the likes of Marcus Hughes, the 55-year-old co-founder of a haulage firm based in Stoke-on-Trent.

Seemingly a respectable businessman, he would boast in a newspaper about a multi-million-pound contract with Amazon, and his role creating much-needed local jobs.

But alongside his legitimate haulage work, Hughes was involved in a far dirtier business – illegally dumping household and business waste he had collected for cash.

He and two associates disposed of more than 26,000 tonnes of rubbish in total – weighing the equivalent of 2,170 double-decker buses – at 17 illicit sites across the country. 

The trio approached firms offering to get rid of waste at bargain rates, before gaining access to vacant land by breaking in. Alternatively, they would trick landowners into handing them leases to farms, industrial units and even an airfield.

Afterwards, they would leave behind bales of rubbish, leaving their victims with £3.2million in clean-up costs – while saving themselves more than £2.7million in landfill taxes and disposal fees. 

When Hughes was jailed for 30 months in January, he was already serving a 14-year stretch for his role in a separate conspiracy.

This time, rather than carrying waste, he transported dirty cash – worth as much as £45million. 

This operation saw Hughes employ two full-time drivers at his Stoke haulage firm – Genesis 2014 (UK) Ltd – to gather banknotes from criminal associates across England before driving them to London to be laundered.

Throughout the operation, Hughes used encrypted messaging platform EncroChat to communicate with Craig Johnson, a convicted fraudster and fellow Stokie living in Dubai.

At one point, Hughes travelled to the UAE to meet Johnson, whose role was exposed after the successful decryption of EncroChat by French law enforcement in June 2020.

A decade earlier, Hughes and Johnson had clubbed together to carry out a vast £250million VAT fraud – one of the largest in UK history.

Hughes was already in prison serving a 12-year stretch for drug smuggling when he was handed six years for the fraud in 2011 alongside 14 associates.

Johnson, meanwhile, remains free in Dubai, where he enjoys a glitzy lifestyle featuring supercars, Rolexes, helicopters and yachts – although his UK assets, including 17th-century country house Meaford Hall in Staffordshire, have now been seized.

‘The new narcotics’

The case of Marcus Hughes is emblematic of the way many career criminals have shifted into the waste sector because it is seen as ‘low risk and high reward’.

Police have called fly-tipping ‘the new narcotics’ – a reflection of the vast amounts of money it can generate for criminals.

Yet while drug traffickers go to great effort and expense to source their product, simply picking up waste and dumping it in a farmer’s field costs next to nothing.

And while cartels contend with the likes of the National Crime Agency, organised waste gangs face a far weaker foe in the form of the Environment Agency, which scarcely manages to clear illegal dumps, let alone prosecute those responsible.

Gangs are paid as much as £2,500 per lorry to illegally dispose of rubbish, often reinvesting the cash in other crimes.

The volume of waste handled this way each year would fill Wembley Stadium 35 times over.

This costs the UK economy an estimated £1billion annually – although this is almost certainly an underestimate given just 27 per cent of waste crimes are reported.

While many criminals dump waste on other people’s land, others are happy to soil their own property. 

They include John Allison, a ‘prolific’ offender who was jailed in 2023 for failing to pay £368,000 to the authorities over a tip he set up on his farm without a permit.

The career criminal, who is in his late seventies, had previously been jailed for three years in 2021 for allowing £800,000 worth of hazardous waste to be buried and burned.

Allison was handed another three years and five months after failing to pay a Proceeds of Crime Order secured by the Environment Agency.

He was automatically released in May after serving half of his sentence.

A relative said from his farmhouse this week: ‘All this was years ago, he has gone to prison and done his time. He won’t be doing anything like it again because if he does, he will lose his family.

‘We have to keep the gates locked because other people think it is all right to fly tip like he used to do, and it all comes back on him.’

Like many waste criminals, Allison has a long criminal history – including prosecutions for operating two cannabis farms at his home containing plants worth nearly £40,000.

Other rogue landowners include Christopher Garrett, who was jailed for 32 months last year for dumping 12,000 tonnes of waste, including asbestos, on land by his house near Kingsteignton in Devon.

Exeter Crown Court heard the 64-year-old was ‘unable to resist’ the money he could earn through illegal tipping – despite his home being on a floodplain.  

He was ordered to pay back £200,000.

Meanwhile, Stephen Lack, 72, allowed his 38-year-old son Andrew to dump waste on farmland he owned in Monkton Sidings, Northamptonshire.

Lack, who had three previous convictions for similar offences on the same land, was handed a 34-week prison sentence, suspended for a year, and given two years to clear the rubbish.

A common tactic among smaller-scale criminals is to advertise waste collection services on social media offering unrealistically cheap rates. 

They include Lee Powell, of Waunheulog in Blaenau Gwent, who was fined more than £1,500 for picking up rubbish from people who had replied to his adverts before abandoning it on a country lane.

He had a string of previous convictions, including for theft, bodily harm and affray.

‘Shut up or we’re coming to get you’

Gangs often operate illegal dumps in full view of local people. But when residents confront them, they risk being met with violence.

One man – who asked to remain anonymous for his own protection – told of his experience after he complained about a gang dumping construction waste on land near his village.

‘Over the years I’d watch them steadily increase their activity, with massive lorries coming from across the country to dump shredded waste in a field secured with gates and CCTV,’ he said.

”I had spoken to the Environment Agency, but it was a waste of time – nothing happened, and I was just told to lobby my MP for extra funds.

‘So, I started talking about what was happening online. Shortly afterwards, I got a message from an unknown number saying, ”Shut up or we’re coming to get you”.’

A recent review of waste crime by the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee heard plentiful evidence about the threat posed by organised criminals.

Biffa, the UK’s second largest waste management firm, said it had seen evidence of fly-tipping gangs also being involved in ‘theft, drug and human trafficking, and violence’.

Committee chair Baroness Sheehan was left ‘shocked’ by the ‘enormous’ scale of the illicit market – and warned taxpayers will be left picking up the tab for decades. 

‘The evidence we heard from a number of sources is that serious organised criminal groups were in this enterprise because they could make millions of pounds and have little fear of being caught,’ she said.

‘And if they were caught, the penalties would be, to them, meaningless. They would get either a penalty charge notice, or if they were prosecuted, they’d get off with very light sentences.

‘This is, to all intents and purposes, crime without punishment. Low risk, very high reward. It’s astonishing.’

Her sharpest criticism, however, was aimed squarely at the Environment Agency.

She pointed to the notorious Hoads Wood site in Kent, where convoys of up to 30 trucks a day dumped mountains of waste.

Despite the agency knowing about the site in 2020, access restrictions were only issued this February – a delay she branded ‘incomprehensible’.

The Environment Agency’s defenders have insisted the organisation needs more funding to effectively fight waste crime and stronger enforcement powers. 

But Baroness Sheehan was left unimpressed by the evidence its bosses gave to her committee. 

‘There didn’t seem to be frustration that they could see all this very lucrative, illegal business going on,’ she said. 

‘They could see it was highly damaging to the environment and to local communities, and yet they didn’t seem to be pushing for a change within the agency so that they could go out and tackle these people.

‘They seemed to be satisfied with the situation as it was, which I found quite irksome.’

The consequences, the Liberal Democrat peer warned, will be ruinously expensive.

‘Some of these sites will cost tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds to clean up,’ she said. ‘Hoads Wood, we know, is going to cost upwards of £15million.

‘This is all going to be paid for by the taxpayer. And as far as I know, none of those sites have had any of their waste removed. Where is that waste going to go?

‘It just beggars belief that we’re in this situation. We need the government to look at it from top to bottom.’

‘I was told not to go near them’

Fly-tipping has surged by 150 per cent in the last 10 years, with many blaming the rise – in part – on the increasing cost of legitimate waste management.

Alasdair Meldrum, director of waste management consultants Albion Environmental, said: ‘The driver behind all of this is landfill tax.

‘If you go to a legitimate landfill site, you’re paying around £160 to £170 a tonne once you include the tax and the gate fee.

‘The clients we work for are all genuinely trying to do the right thing and manage waste properly. But they’re just being totally undercut.’

Mr Meldrum, who hosts the Rubbish Talks podcast, says waste crime is now so common that he finds it hard to tell legitimate operators from illegal ones.

He continued: ‘We try as much as possible to avoid the dodgier end of the market. But sometimes it’s difficult. They’re very good at making them appear as clean as a whistle.

‘I had one enquiry recently and they seem completely kosher – I did my research and on paper they looked absolutely fine – but one of my contacts told me not to touch them.’

Respondents to the 2025 National Waste Crime Survey estimated that 35 per cent of waste crime is now committed by organised crime groups.

At the end of March 2025, the Environment Agency recorded 451 illegal waste sites as being active, up from 344 a year earlier.

The department also uncovered another 749 new sites, of which 743 were shut down.

One fly-tip in Worcestershire stretches for more than 100 yards and reaches a height of almost 70ft, equivalent to the space occupied by eight sizeable homes.

The pile is kept behind a padlocked fence by what used to be known as The Crabbe Yard, a plant and haulage depot three miles from the town of Pershore.

Paul Bennett, a Worcestershire County Councillor, who lives locally, said: ‘You can see this is a very sophisticated operation which will have involved heavy machinery.

‘It is particularly worrying that this is right next to a brook which feeds into the River Avon.’

Locals say that the problem has been growing for years with nobody taking any action.

Mary Evans, 76, a former shopkeeper who lives up the road, said: ‘My neighbour could see it from her side window and would report the lorries arriving to the council.

‘But every time they got to the site, those responsible had gone. We thought someone was tipping them off.’

The owner of the Yard is John Bruce. Locals say he owns several other yards in the area and has been in and out of prison.

‘He never stops making money though,’ said one, who asked not to be named.

In 2002, Bruce was jailed for a year for dumping illegal waste, including asbestos, at several unlicensed sites.

He has also been prosecuted for allowing heavy oil to pour into a stream, running a scrap metal site without a licence and operating an unlicensed second-hand commercial vehicle dealership.

Former local MP Peter Luff raised concerns about the environmental impact of activities at The Crabbe Yard in Parliament as far back as 2003.

‘You could register a dead dog’  

In a rare official escalation, police from the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit have joined the Environment Agency to investigate the huge tip in Kidlington, which would cost the local council more than its entire annual budget to clean up.

Experts are convinced the size of the site – which stretches for a staggering 500ft and borders the River Cherwell – means it will inevitably be linked to organised crime.

Investigators have hailed the arrest of a 39-year-old man from Guildford in Surrey as evidence of progress.

But Sam Corp, head of regulation at the Environmental Services Association, said even when gangs are caught and prosecuted, they simply view the penalties as ‘a business expense’.

‘There is too low a risk of being caught and, even if the culprits are caught, the penalties are – in the vast majority of cases – an insufficient deterrent,’ he said.

Baroness Sheehan is now urging sweeping reform of the waste-licensing system, which she describes as overly lax.

Without action, the peer fears Britain risks becoming like Italy, where mafia groups control waste disposal in their local areas.  

She said: ‘At the moment, all you have to do is to register to be a carrier, broker or a dealer. That’s it.

‘And you can register a dead dog, as it turns out, or you can register a goldfish, as some people were successful in doing. It’s a system that’s absolutely broken.

‘Anyone who’s a criminal can register. There seems to be no checks and balances on that. That needs to change very quickly.’ 

An Environment Agency spokesperson said: ‘Illegal waste dumping is appalling, and we work tirelessly to protect the environment and communities from it.

‘Investigations can be multi-layered and complex as we look to bring rogue operators often from the criminal underworld to justice.

‘Last year alone our dedicated teams successfully stopped activity at 743 illegal waste sites and we’re doubling staff in our Joint Waste Crime Unit to help crack down on these miserable crimes.’

Defra said: ‘This Government is working in lockstep with the Environment Agency to clamp down on these appalling waste crimes which blight our communities and natural spaces.

‘We’re tightening the net on gangs exploiting our waste system by funding more Environment Agency enforcement officers, increasing their budget for waste crime enforcement by over 50 per cent and imposing tougher sentences for those who transport waste illegally.’

Ross Slater contributed reporting.