Residents living in the area have previously told the BBC they feel “forgotten about”<\/a> as they are surrounded by rats, flies and an “unbearable smell”.<\/p>\nNicha Rowson, a beautician who has been forced to move her studio out of her home because of the stench, said the decision to clear up the site was “amazing news”.<\/p>\n
“I’m sure the community that I’ve been campaigning for is just as happy as I am with the news,” she added.<\/p>\n
However, she said it should not have taken so long for a decision to have been made, saying: “Money’s been put before residents’ physical and mental health.”<\/p>\n
She added that it “was not good enough” that the culprit had not yet been prosecuted and the taxpayer had now been left to pay for the clear-up.<\/p>\n
The other two sites earmarked for clearance are a 20,000-tonne dump on an industrial site in Sheffield and a 10,000-tonne tip in Hyndburn, Lancashire.<\/p>\n
The government, which has not yet said how much the clear-ups will cost, still has to carry out site-specific assessments to ensure the logistics of any clearance are feasible before they can start.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, the BBC revealed that among hundreds of illegal dumps operating across England, at least 11 are so-called “supersites”, containing more than 20,000 tonnes.<\/p>\n
Tens of thousands of tonnes of waste has been dumped on the land in Over<\/a>, near Gloucester, and witnesses have told the BBC that, at its height, 30-50 vehicles were going onto the site to dump rubbish every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The three sites identified for clearance include a notorious dump in Bickershaw, near Wigan, which caught fire last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-485506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}