Andrew Brooks, who lives with his wife Fay and two children aged 8 and 10 in a nearby housing estate, said he suffered from pressure in his head, while their younger child had a lot of nosebleeds which could be linked to the “rotten onion and baby nappy” smell.
Fleetwood is a deprived area whose residents suffer from higher levels of asthma and nearly double the average rate of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which worsen when breathing noxious air, according to UKHSA guidelines.
Ms Beavers, the town’s MP, used parliamentary privilege to describe Transwaste as “crooks” who were being allowed to “evade accountability for their crimes”.
A spokesman for Transwaste said the company acknowledged that as a working landfill site, “odour can occur, and we have been clear with residents and with regulators that we are determined to reduce off-site odour as quickly as possible”.
The spokesman insisted odour and harm were “not the same thing”, adding: “The Environment Agency’s 609-day air quality study, continues to show that key pollutants are well within WHO and UK health-based safety standards, and that no thresholds for the protection of human health have been breached.”
A regulatory enforcement notice was handed by the EA to Transwaste in May to ensure the operator focused on putting temporary capping on an area of the landfill it identified as potentially causing the smell. Transwaste can now only accept waste types unlikely to produce smells, such as soil, concrete and bricks.
As the Government tackles illegal waste dumping, campaigners are calling for it to do the same to landfill sites being mismanaged.
A spokesman for the EA said: “Nobody should have to tolerate unacceptable odours, and we took decisive action to stop waste acceptance at the Flusco and Hespin Wood Landfill sites.
“At Jameson Road we have changed the operator’s environmental permit so that they can only accept non-odorous waste and we have pushed them to carry out more air quality monitoring, while work to permanently cover the site is ongoing.
“In all cases we continue to carry out regular inspections and odour surveys to monitor the impact on local residents and we will not hesitate to take further action if necessary to protect the local communities and wider environment.”