OPINION: For more than a decade, the ESA has campaigned for regulatory and enforcement reform to stem the rising tide of waste crime blighting our communities and countryside. A recent spate of high-profile dumping incidents, alongside renewed media and parliamentary scrutiny, has increased pressure on policymakers, culminating in a steady stream of measures announced this week alongside Defra’s ten-point action plan revealed today.
Fly-tipping and illegal dumping happen on the nation’s doorstep and represent the most visible consequences of waste crime. It is therefore natural that they attract the greatest policy attention. Yet these incidents – shocking though they can be – are dwarfed by more sophisticated forms of waste crime operating on the fringes of legitimacy.
Landfill tax evasion, for example, remains under-enforced and largely hidden from public view, yet results in the illegal dumping of millions of tonnes of waste each year. This creates a significant long-term liability for future generations while also stifling present-day investment in the circular economy.
This week, the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee held follow-up sessions to its 2025 waste crime inquiry, which drew on supplementary evidence submitted by the ESA on the scale and impact of the problem. In a recent letter to the committee, we submitted a revised estimate that the true cost of waste crime to the UK is now closer to £2 billion a year, with landfill tax evasion accounting for roughly half of this figure – far exceeding the official tax gap estimate. This criminality undercuts legitimate businesses, forces compliant operators out of the market, and discourages investment and job creation.
The ESA remains strongly supportive of all efforts to tackle waste crime. Any measures that deter, disrupt and hold accountable those undermining our sector are to be welcomed. But how many of the measures announced this week are genuinely new – and will they make a meaningful difference in addressing waste crime in its many forms?
The most notable new interventions include the creation of an Operational Waste Intelligence and Analysis Unit; proposals to name and shame operators involved in the mishandling of waste (alongside permit revocation); and a new partnership with HM Land Registry to reduce opportunities for abandonment of illegal sites.
However, other commitments – such as improving the sharing and handling of intelligence, taking earlier action to tackle large dumps, working in partnership with others, and addressing persistent poor performance – largely reflect the status quo or are initiatives that should be de rigueur by now. It is therefore a little disappointing not to see these areas developed into more ambitious, specific, measurable and time-bound objectives, supported by commensurate resources.
The action plan also doesn’t set out new measures for tackling the aforementioned complex fraud associated with permitted sites engaging in illegal activities, such as waste misdescription to evade tax or other costs. These practices remain difficult to detect and prosecute, despite their huge scale and damaging impact on the sector and the public purse. At the least, focused disruption efforts could make a significant difference here, given the relatively small number of suspect sites, but this would require sustained on-the-ground enforcement and fuller use of existing powers.
Resourcing has long been the Achilles’ heel of enforcement agencies. The effectiveness of recently-announced measures – such as issuing penalty points to fly-tipping drivers; requiring offenders to join “clean up squads” or deploying drones to detect sites – will depend heavily on the availability of enforcement capacity at a local level. We are heartened to see Government’s commitment of £45 million over the next three years to support enforcement activity, but it is not clear how this will support local authority enforcement efforts, and it is essential that the lion’s share of this budget directly funds boots-on-the-ground activity.
The uplift in enforcement funding is a good start but, given the cost to the public purse of landfill tax evasion alone, there is a clear return on investment case to be made for more – and there are revenue-raising options for this activity that don’t impact the taxpayer, such as ring-fencing permit fees.
The ESA has four key priorities for tackling waste crime: preventing criminals from entering the sector through tighter regulation; restricting access to waste materials by enforcing stronger Duty of Care obligations on major producers, particularly in construction; increasing efforts to disrupt illegal sites through better-resourced enforcement; and ensuring penalties are sufficiently robust to act as genuine deterrents.
While we await further detail on how the action plan will be resourced and implemented, it remains unclear whether it delivers against these priorities. This must not be a short-term crack down for political expediency – it must be sustained, evolved and funded in the long term, complemented with structural regulatory and judiciary reforms designed to cut off the supply of waste to criminals and provide meaningful deterrent.
That said, we recognise that eliminating waste crime represents a Sisyphean task for regulators and enforcement agencies given current resource constraints; the scale of the problem and the adaptability of serious organised criminals intent on perpetrating these crimes. The ESA and its members welcome the Government’s commitment to action to deliver earlier, faster and more effective interventions, and we remain committed to working in partnership with regulators – sharing intelligence and continuing to advocate for the legislative changes needed to ensure enforcement bodies have the powers and resources required to effectively deter and disrupt criminal activity involving waste.
