A mother has told Sky News how her home has become a “prison” which forced her eight-year-old son to move out – after 25,000 tonnes of illegally dumped waste burned for nine days last year.
Nicha Rowson, who lives just metres from a major illegal waste site in Bickershaw, Wigan, said the 17-month ordeal has “teared our family apart”.
The smell of the dump makes Nicha’s son Oliver, who has autism, so physically ill that he moved out to live with his grandmother.
“It’s put stress on our family, our mental health isn’t great. It’s like being separated parents. Even though me and my partner are together, we’re sharing the child with the grandparents,” Nicha said.
“I can’t keep saying, ‘oh soon it’ll be cleared up’ because it isn’t. I don’t know what else I can tell my child, why he has to live in this prison. Because it is, it’s like a prison.”
The family home has had such a major rat infestation that the family were forced to tear down their ceiling to tackle the issue. Nicha also found a dead rat in her living room.
“We could see rats running along our fences, running around the street at the front, they were just everywhere.”
Sky News has been investigating how, across the country, waste crime is a growing scourge and a booming business being exploited by criminal gangs.
Being paid to remove rubbish only to dump it illegally without sorting it or paying tax is an easy way of making huge amounts of money, with poorly enforced legal repercussions and a huge cost to the environment.
It’s something the previous head of the Environment Agency called “the new narcotics”.
– It’s thought a fifth of all waste in England is being illegally managed
– That’s around 34 million tonnes a year, enough to fill about four million skips
– It costs the economy around a billion pounds a year, with legitimate operators thought to be losing a further £3bn from missed business
Last July, we tracked down a group of suspected organised fly-tippers who waved wads of cash on TikTok after dumping waste in the countryside.
Nicha said she feels like she’s “failing” as a parent. “I’m fighting and fighting, and I’m not winning the battle. At the end of the day if my child has to move out to be healthy, then that’s what he has to do. But it’s hard.”
The dumping started on Bolton House Road in the autumn of 2024, and within a few months, mountains of waste formed in the quiet scrapyard.
Read more: Rats, flies and maggots plague Wigan residents
In July of last year, in the middle of a heatwave, a major incident was declared when the tip caught fire, forcing the local primary school to close for several days, and several residents were sent to hospital.
The fire burned for nine days, which caused such a strain on resources that residents had no water for days.
Nicha feels abandoned by the Environment Agency (EA) and the local council.
“All the way through we’ve been begging for help, we’ve done the professional emails but in the end we’ve resorted to saying this is inhumane, we’re living in a prison, we need some help, and they’re just ignoring us,” she said.
If you have been affected by fly-tipping, email [email protected] or send us a message on Whatsapp
Some 200 miles away, a similarly sized site in Kidlington, Oxfordshire made headlines before Christmas, with dumping starting there last summer.
But the EA has said it will spend £9.6m clearing the site in what they say is an “exceptional decision”, leading the local MP Josh Simons to accuse it of seeming to apply “exceptional circumstances to middle-class areas in Oxford but not working-class towns in Wigan”.
“When primary school kids are inhaling flames from a dump that’s on fire, declared as a major incident, why does that not count as an exceptional circumstance?” he said in a post on X.
This divide was also raised in the House of Lords last week by Baroness Sheehan, the chair of the Lords’ environment and climate change committee.
She told Sky News: “The nature of the waste in the Bickershaw site, it’s hazardous waste, it is rotting waste. It really should be a high priority for the safety of the residents and the school children there.”
Nicha says she feels like the authorities “don’t care” about her and her husband’s plight.
“We’re working hard, we’re both self-employed working six, seven days a week, and we’ve got to the point now where our house isn’t worth anything, and no one gives a hoot – no one cares,” she said.
“Because of the tip, the smells… it devalued our house [that] if we sold it, we might not get enough to cover the mortgage that’s outstanding on it.
“My message to the Environment Agency is to stop thinking about the money and passing the buck – think about the mental and physical health of the residents.”
What’s being done about it?
A spokesperson for the EA told Sky News that they are paying to clear the Kidlington site due to “new information [that] has come to light about the rapidly escalating fire risks with potential to close the A34 major highway and impact key electrical supplies”.
The spokesperson continued: “This does not undermine the real impacts to the local community in Wigan, and we are doing everything within our power to ensure that the perpetrators pay the price to clean up the site, rather than taxpayers.”
Wigan Council is paying for a part of the site to be cleared where the waste has spilled onto a nature reserve that the council owns.
A spokesperson said this clear up “will come at a cost to the council” and that the council “understands the difficulties that residents living close to the illegal waste site at Bolton House Road have endured and would like to see the entire site cleared as a matter of priority”.
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“The leader of the council, David Molyneux MBE, has written to the chief executive of the Environment Agency to understand why funding was made available for the waste site in Oxfordshire, but not for Bolton House Road,” the spokesperson has said.
“The council would like to call on the government to make funding available – via the Environment Agency or other department – as has been done for other sites, given the risks the site poses and the detrimental impact this has had on neighbouring residents and the adjacent primary school.”
