A 2025 photograph of the site (image credit: Thames21).
Four further arrests have been made in late January in connection with a large illegal waste dump occurring in Kidlington, Oxfordshire last Summer, which was widely reported in November.
In a joint raid early on Tuesday 20 January, officers from both the Environment Agency and the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit arrested two people, aged 44 and 49, from the Sale and Rochdale areas of Greater Manchester, said the EA.
This was followed by two further arrests subsequent to warrants issued on 29 January, of a 69-year-old male in Andover, and a 54-year-old male in Slough, involving the EA and a officers from a number of police forces. In respect of these latter arrests, the EA noted they had been made for environmental and money laundering offences.
The investigation has also produced the initial arrest on 25 November of a 39-year-old man from Guildford.
The 21,000-tonne waste mountain – said to include domestic waste, plastics, polystyrene, and tyres, in the BBC’s reporting – was first attended by the EA on 2 July 2025, although some of the waste was added after that date, before the site was closed in late October.
Being situated in a field beside the River Cherwell has also presented the risk of polluting hundreds of miles of waterways, and the site was declared a critical incident by the agency in late November.
The potential risks of a fire also prompted the EA to make “an exceptional decision” in December “to progress works to entirely clear the site of waste”.
It is not the largest such fly-tipping incident to have happened in the English countryside, and other sites that have yet to be cleared up include a 280,000-tonne dump in Cheshire, 50,000-tonne sites in both Lancashire and Cornwall, a 36,000-tonne site in Kent and another in Oxfordshire comprising 20,000 tonnes of waste, as the BBC has reported.
The incident prompted a discussion in Parliament on November, on how to address the issue of illegal waste and organised crime.
