ENGLAND'S green and pleasant land isn't quite so green and pleasant when some Herbert decides to tip rubbish all over it.

Fly tipping - so-called as it is tipping done sneakliy "on the fly" - is one of the banes of the countryside.

Meandering down a leafy lane on a sunny spring afternoon, you don't want to suddenly come across a ditch full of garden waste, failed DIY or a fridge-freezer that's seen far better days.

Yet you do.

People too idle, for that is all it is, to take rubbish to the local refuse tip, dump it in a quiet spot in the countryside and scarper before anyone spots them.

It's a problem that's been with us for a long time now, but it's getting worse.

Recently published figures by Flycapture - the wonderfully named national fly-tipping database compiled by Defra and the Environment Agency - show that somewhere in the West Midlands waste is illegally dumped every 10 minutes and a black bag of rubbish is dumped every half an hour.

From April to November last year, there were 26,700 fly-tipping incidents in the area costing £1,718,000 to clear away.

Yet that, according to farmers and landowners, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Because the Flycapture figures don't include incidents dealt with by private landowners. And since much of the illegal tipping is on farms and private land, either by throwing the debris over a gate or hedge into a field, the Government calculations are "a gross underestimation of the scale of the crime". Which is a quote from Donna Tavernor, the West Midlands regional adviser for the Country Land and Business Association, better known as the CLA.

"The Government figures shine a welcome spotlight on this pervasive and polluting crime," she added.

"However, the situation is worse than even these dreadful statistics suggest.

"A CLA survey of members in 2004 found that a third of respondents experienced fly-tipping on a weekly basis.

"All respondents said they lived near a local authority waste site and were effectively paying to clean up waste that was being illegally dumped on their land by people who either wanted to avoid paying charges at the waste site or had arrived to find it the site closed."

Among the more bizarre items found on private land around here last year were a bin bag full of soft toys, the interior of a chip shop, including the deep fat fryer, half a caravan, a whole kitchen, three avocado coloured baths and a stack of 30 assorted telephone directories.

Seventy-six per cent of all dumped materials have once been household or gardens items.

A fly-tippers' Top Five favourite spots came out: 1. Roadsides

2. Council land

3. Country paths

4. Private land

5. Back alleyways.

More worrying still is that waste is dumped in a watercourse somewhere in the West Midlands at least twice every week.

In the face of this, the Government has introduced a Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Bill that will allow barriers across rights of way to prevent fly-tipping and other crimes.

However, there are no provisions in the Bill requiring either local authorities or the Environment Agency to deal with fly-tipped material on any private land.

"Until we have figures indicating the fly-tipping incidents on all land the true scale will never be ascertained and the necessary resources to deal with the problem will never be allocated," Miss Tavernor added.

In the meantime, the countryside continues to be a rubbish dump for vandals on dark nights.