Calls to close stinking landfill site after inquiry reveals 70 permit breaches

Furious campaigners are demanding the closure of a stinking landfill site in Fleetwood after an inquiry revealed as many as 70 permit breaches at the site in less than two years.

The extent of the breaches came to light after an FOI (Freedom of Information) request was made by campaign group Action Against Jameson road Landfill.

Group member Jess Brown approached the Environment Agency (EA) with a request for information about breaches of the site permit committed by landfill operators Transwaste Ltd, from February 2024 to November 2025.

It revealed a staggering number of failures to comply with various conditions of the permit, including not complying with enforcement notices handed out by the EA, which has been criticised for not doing enough to protect residents.

The EA is the official body which has been monitoring the site since a flood of complaints started to be made by residents in Fleetwood and surrounding areas about a vile stench likened to rotten eggs

The stench is being caused by a number of chemicals, including  hydrogen sulfide, sulphur dioxide and methane, being released from the ground because of materials being dumped there.

Objectors say that not only is the disgusting smell a public nuisance in its own right, forcing residents to shut their windows on hot days and children to be unable to play in their gardens, but they are worried about the health implications caused by the chemical emissions.

Transwaste says the breaches need to be seen in an operational context, with many of the breaches relating to a single issue which, in some cases, inflated the  actual number of breaches.

Jess Brown said: “EA have known abut these breaches but have said nothing to us abut them – we feel we’ve been lied to and told that everything was under control when it obviously wasn’t.

“I made the FOI request because I was certain there had been many breaches of that permit.

“And when the information came back, I wasn’t even surprised that there were that many.

“All this time, people have had to put up with this nuisance, affecting their quality of life and even their health.

“We expect that this information is enough to finally get this site closed for good. How can it be allowed to continue now?

“If this was going on down south, in other areas, it wouldn’t have been tolerated. Why should it be tolerated here in Fleetwood?”

Questions are also being asked why Transwaste was allowed to take over the site in the first place, after it had been closed following the departure of previous operators Suez.

The site is owned by Wyre Council, who are the landlords of the site.

Last year Wyre Council was challenged by campaigners to do more to help long-suffering residents, as both local authority and landlord. Residents say the council is not doing enough.

The council was asked to declare the activities at the site a statutory nuisance and to issue an abatement notice.

However, Wyre Council leader, Cllr Michael Vincent, told campaigners in a stormy council meeting that an abatement notice would not be a quick solution to the issue and the responsibility was on EA to use its greater powers to shut the site down.

Cllr Vincent said that to be a statutory nuisance, the council must prove that there is a nuisance that has unreasonably and substantially interfered with use or enjoyment of homes on premises

He said this could only be done by residents across Fleetwood and the worst affected parts of Cleveleys and Thornton filling in the diary sheets every day, explaining how it was affecting them, and to continue to do so even after an abatement notice had been served.

The many and varied breaches included a leachate outbreak – an uncontrolled release of polluted liquid – being observed  in Cell 6 in April 2024, while another breach was a failure to report this leachate outbreak to  EA.

Another breach in the same month was ‘inadequate cover to prevent emissions of odour’.

A year later, breaches were still continuing  when in March 2025 there was a failure to control landfill gas emissions, again from Cell 6.

In June 2025 there was ‘an inadequate report on a badly managed site’.

in August 2025 another breach was for ‘changes to agreed design that have been constructed without agreement and not reported to the validation report’

A spokesperson for the Environment Agency said: “We understand how distressing the odours from the Jameson Road landfill site have been for local residents.

“We are maintaining an increased regulatory response and require Transwaste to take all necessary steps to comply fully with its environmental permit.

“Where we identify breaches of permit, we follow up with regulatory action as needed.

“We will continue to keep residents and the local community updated through a variety of engagement activities.’’

A Transwaste spokesman said: “The recorded breaches over the past reporting period must be viewed in their proper regulatory and operational context.

“Modern landfill regulation is highly prescriptive, technically detailed and subject to increasing national scrutiny. Transwaste is an environmentally responsible company that takes its statutory and environmental obligations extremely seriously, and the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of regulated tasks we undertake each year are completed in full compliance with our permits.

“A detailed review shows that most recorded breaches are technical or administrative in nature. They relate primarily to documentation timing, engineering specification wording, monitoring frequency, reporting formats or minor exceedances that did not result in measurable environmental harm.

“In many instances, several compliance scores arise from a single underlying issue that engages multiple permit conditions, which can inflate the apparent scale of non-compliance when viewed numerically.

“Over the past two years there has also been increased regulatory scrutiny across the landfill sector, with greater emphasis on formal scoring and reduced reliance on informal resolution. This has led to more technical departures being formally recorded.

“Importantly, the majority of breaches did not result in pollution events, systemic management failure or unsafe operational practice, and were addressed promptly and responsibly.”

Wyre Council has also been approached for a comment.