Jan Hobbs

Criminals dumped 200 tonnes of rubbish on an 80-year-old farmer's field in Hertfordshire, and the law sent him the bill. 40 lorryloads over 3 nights from 7 June last year, on a field edge near St Albans that he had put into a government scheme to grow seed for wild birds. Roofing sheets, bathroom fittings, house clearances, medical waste, and sheets of what looked like asbestos. He had just lost his wife. He would not give the papers his name because the people who did it know where the field is. The council could not find them. So it wrote to him, because it could find him, and told him that if the waste was not cleared he would be prosecuted. The same rule runs in every county, and it is written on gov.uk: waste dumped on your land is yours to remove, at your cost, and the Environment Agency will not touch a tip that size. The quotes came back at £40,000 to £50,000. He said, plainly, that he did not have it. In England there were 1,152,617 fly-tipping incidents in 2024. 1,598 ended in a prosecution. About 1 in 700. The criminals vanish. The man with the deeds is in the phone book. Then a 31-year-old called Archie Ford, with no farm and no reason, read the story and opened a fundraising page. £30,000 came in the first day from nearly 1,000 people. £50,000 in 3 days. Almost 2,000 donors in the end. In March he drove out to meet the farmer, and by June the field was clear and the money left over was set aside for the next victim, because there will be one. This week is Rural Crime Action Week and the NFU has put his case back on the table, because nothing in the rule that produced it has moved. 2,000 strangers understood in a day what the statute book has not understood in 36 years of the Environmental Protection Act. A field is not a crime scene you have to pay to attend.