The changes to the regime were announced yesterday (6 February 2023) by environment minister Rebecca Pow (see letsrecycle.com story).
The head of Regulation at the ESA, Sam Corp, said: “We welcome the government’s announcement and support the principle of tightening up the exemption regime to only enable their use for genuinely low risk activities, and to make it much more difficult for waste criminals to use them for illegal waste management and disposal.”
Mr Corp explained that the association has for several years been calling for tighter controls and a “more robust and properly funded regulatory regime” to enable an appropriate level of regulatory scrutiny of exemptions.
The ESA commissioned its own research which first highlighted that breaches of the exemption regime have an £87 million economic cost to the UK, pointed out Mr Corp.
He continued: “It is clear that the light touch regulation associated with the current regime has enabled waste criminals to utilise easy and free-to-obtain exemptions to provide a veneer of legitimacy to illegal operations, safe in the knowledge that there would be little or no regulatory scrutiny of the operation.
“For these reasons it is vital that reform to the exemption regime must be accompanied by robust and consistent enforcement of the new rules.”
Permitting
The ESA also believes that exemption reform must go hand in hand with improvement of the Environment Agency’s permitting service. This is because the waste sector has faced delays in securing permit changes and has worked under exemptions on an interim basis while waiting for the regulator amend permits.
Mr Corp explained: “Many perfectly legitimate operators have previously used the exemption system as an alternative to permit variations to enable short term operational flexibility, in the context of applications taking several months – or even years – to obtain a permit variation to enable the same activity.”
Consequently, a speedier service for the updating and amending of permits is high on the ESA’s wish list.
Legislation
While decisions have been regarding the waste exemptions regime, the sector now awaits publication by government of other legislative measures around waste regulation. This includes updates to the carriers, brokers and dealers rules, particularly around waste transport, and waste tracking.
There has long been concern that registration as a waste carrier has been too easy and cheap, with some considering the registration barely worth the paper it is written on and that it gives little confidence in standards.
Work on waste tracking centres around record-keeping around waste arisings and movement with regulators working on proposals for a digital tracking system.
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