Councillors say a pile of waste dumped on land near Hinckley will cost taxpayers "hundreds of thousands of pounds" to clear up.

An estimated 5,000 cubic metres of waste was found on council-owned land off the A47 Leicester Road between Hinckley and Earl Shilton, which until recently had been earmarked for a new crematorium.

Hinckley and Bosworth District Council said it was notified of the waste dump on 5 August and it amounted to the largest fly tip it had ever had to deal with.

Council leader Stuart Bray said "substantial barriers" had been removed to allow people to gain access to the site and it was believed to be the work of an "organised crime gang" not "a chancer".

Two vehicles found on the site were removed under local authority powers for vehicles suspected of being used in waste crime, the authority added.

Bray said: "I am absolutely appalled, it is going to cost taxpayers significant amounts of money in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. It is clearly an organised crime gang.

"My clear advice to anybody who contracts a waste operator - make sure they are properly registered and not a cowboy operator because otherwise you don't where they are going to end up disposing of it."

Peter Haslock, an enforcement team leader at the Environment Agency, said he estimated over 200 tonnes of waste had been dumped at the site.

"We think that may have happened relatively quickly, maybe over the course of a number of days, perhaps a week," he said.

"These waste criminals who deposit this sort of material can move huge quantities of waste really quite quickly."

Haslock said the waste was made up of household, commercial and industrial waste such as plastics, paper and construction materials.

Machinery had been used to create "earth dams" to conceal the waste, he said, and clean-up costs could run into six figures.

"Until we know exactly how much material there is and what else is in that material it's very difficult for me to give an estimate, but it will be many thousands of pounds, hundreds of thousands of pounds potentially," he said.

"So this has a real impact on the local authority and the community around here because it is taking taxpayers' money to clean up what these criminals have made from this enterprise."

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