'I don't know how to tell my child why he has to live in this prison'

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." 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. 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.