Waste crime is often enabled by gaps – between agencies, borders, paperwork and reality, and legitimate businesses and rogue operators – Andrea Lockerbie explores where the gaps are and what can help close them.
Waste crime was famously described by former head of the Environment Agency (EA) Sir James Bevan as ‘the new narcotics’. Analysis that the Environmental Services Association (ESA) commissioned in 2021 put the cost of it to the UK economy at around £1 billion a year, but last year the organisation stated that recent evidence suggested that landfill tax evasion on its own may be in the order of £1bn, putting the total cost of waste crime at closer to £2bn.
The House of Lords’ Environment and Climate Change Committee has been putting pressure on the government to address waste crime, with chair, Baroness Sheehan, describing it as ‘critically under-prioritised despite its significant environmental, economic and social costs’.
Following a short inquiry into the issue, in October Baroness Sheehan set out the committee’s findings and eight recommendations in a letter to then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Emma Reynolds, calling for the Government to commission a ‘root and branch’ independent review.
Evidence gathered through the inquiry highlighted multiple problems:
- inconsistent intelligence sharing and collaboration between agencies;
- lack of ownership by agencies on the issue;
- under-reporting of waste crime and lack of clarity around who to report to;
- poor enforcement reaction times;
- lack of deterrents for criminals;
- lack of funding for enforcement;
- lack of understanding of and full use of the legal tools and processes available to bring criminals to justice;
- low prioritisation of waste crime by the police and the National Crime Agency;
- not enough emphasis on and enforcement of the duty of care requirements of waste producers;
- and paper-based waste transfer note system that allowed falsification and misdescription.
The inquiry heard how the waste sector had been infiltrated by organised crime groups who bought and operated legitimate waste businesses to enable their crimes, to the detriment of those operating legally.
The committee’s work has led to movement. Reynolds told the committee in March that she wanted to focus resources on dealing with waste crime rather than a review of it. Days later, the government published its Waste Crime Action Plan and the EA published its 10-point plan.
Emphasis has been placed on the need for a tougher, coordinated and intelligence-led approach, with partnership working at the centre. The EA will work with Crimestoppers to improve intelligence flows, increase public reporting, and share heat maps of reported waste crime. The government also boosted the EA’s enforcement budget by an additional £45 million over the next three years, while Defra and the Home Office will give EA officers with new police-style powers.
Partnership is essential
Matthew Scott, Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) in Kent, told the committee in September that there was ‘a Bermuda Triangle of intelligence’ due to the different agencies involved, with different powers and different reporting mechanisms.
There was not a sufficient joined-up approach, which led to missed opportunities, as well as agencies lacking enough vetted staff able to access the intelligence or attend the necessary meetings.
But he highlighted effective steps taken in Kent, where waste crime, fly-tipping and partnership working have been prioritised. Joint operations to disrupt waste crime in the area have involved local councils, the Joint Unit for Waste Crime (JUWC), EA, DVSA, HMRC, and Kent Police working together in various combinations.
Stopping vehicles on the road has been an effective disruption technique as the police have powers to seize vehicles, whether this be for being over their vehicle weight limit or not being roadworthy. In one such operation, some 20 vehicles were taken off the road in a matter of hours.
As Scott explained: “If there is one thing that policing does well when working in partnership, it is disruption…get them for something. If they have 44 tonnes on their lorry but the brake lights are out, stop them. Start asking questions.”
He believed it was important to have the local council out on joint operations, as they have powers in relation to fly-tipping. “The police often do joint operations with HMRC where they stop an HGV belonging to a company that has been subject to Treasury fines and the police will often collect the fines on behalf of the Treasury…there are other agencies such as the DVSA and HMRC that can help with the wider disruption, and we have seen that work quite well.”
According to David Sidwick, PCC for Dorset, waste crime could be ‘defeated only by partnership’. In the south-west, the five PCCs came together to conduct the area’s first rural crime survey and found fly-tipping at the top of the list. As a result, it is a core priority in the police and crime plan for Dorset and investment has been made in its rural crime team.
Dorset has created the Dorset Partnership Against Rural Crime, which includes representatives from groups including the Country Land and Business Association, National Farmers’ Union, local authority and EA.
“That has allowed us to get to a stage where we are sharing intelligence,” Sidwick said. He also co-funds, along with a local authority, a fly-tipping investigator. “This has revolutionised the number of fixed penalty notices and the way that the police are able to seize vehicles. More importantly, it has meant that the EA works extremely closely with us now.”
Sidwick explained that in Dorset the police try to ‘deny the roads to the illegal waste carriers’ by working with the rural crime team, EA and local authority. In such operations they will pull over hauliers to see what they are carrying and what they are doing.
The rural crime team of 17 focuses on serious organised crime ‘because the individuals who are nicking the tractors and putting them on the ferry across the channel are the same people who are doing the industrial waste crime’.
Operation Ragwort was created by the five PCCs and five police forces in the south-west to share intelligence, mainly related to agricultural theft and waste that moves across its borders. Through joint operations, not necessarily focused on waste, they see an opportunity to make connections with serious criminals who work across sectors.
Focus upstream
According to Philip Duffy, the Environment Agency chief executive, its 10-point plan marks a series of shifts in how it deals with waste crime.
“The most important of those is this relentless focus on where this waste [dumped on illegal sites] is coming from and who in the system is diverting their waste,” he told the committee in March.
The plan includes the creation of a new Operational Waste Intelligence and Analysis Unit that integrates intelligence, visual imagery, financial and criminal data to help identify risks earlier. If intelligence indicates that operators or waste carriers are diverting waste from the legitimate supply chain, it will use its regulatory powers, including deregistering, suspending or revoking permits.
Fit and proper permit checks will stop permits being transferred. And it will work with HM Land Registry to strengthen how information on land ownership and transactions is shared and used, as well as with the government on ways to reduce opportunities for land to be transferred to parties who cannot be held accountable, which leaves sites vulnerable to illegal dumping.
As Duffy explained, a way to spot likely illegal waste sites is through suspicious transactions in the Land Registry. “The land is often parcelled up into multiple small strips, and this is done to make sure that the criminals can evade their obligations to clear the site, because it makes it impossible for the EA or another actor to specify on whose land the waste is and who is responsible.”
Being able to spot this in advance could enable the EA to ‘seek a proactive stop or restriction order or use local government or anti-social behaviour powers to prevent access to that site before the waste criminals got to it’.
But the biggest form of criminality in waste is not illegal dumping, it is tax evasion. Duffy told the Lords that some criminals run impeccably managed permitted sites, and the EA suspects a number of them.
“There is not a hair out of place on their sites. However, they are not declaring their taxes properly, and they are partnering up with criminals elsewhere… We need to find a way of saying ‘I don’t care how well you run your site, you’re involved with crime so you can’t have a permit’.”
Work on scrutinising these permit holders upstream requires the capability to conduct financial or tax audits. Malcolm Lythgo, director of Environmental Markets and Enforcement at the Environment Agency, added that working with HMRC on tax affairs was an ‘effective mechanism’ and account freezing orders could be a quicker way to ‘hit people in the pockets’ and stop operations.
The current paper-based waste transfer note system has made it very difficult to know where waste goes. Therefore, implementation of the digital waste tracking system, which is mandatory for permitted waste receiving sites from October, should help.
It requires these sites to digitally record the waste they receive, making non-compliance and unusual patterns easier to detect. Next year, digital waste tracking should extend to waste carriers, brokers and dealers.
Long-awaited reforms to the waste carriers, brokers and dealers’ system, expected to come in next year, will also tighten up the system – and should help prevent criminals from entering the system – by moving away from an online registration form to obtain a license, to regulation under Environmental Permitting Regulations.
The new system will require the demonstration of technical competence as well as identity and criminal record checks and drivers of vehicles transporting waste will have to carry relevant permit numbers. By putting this system under the Environmental Permitting Regulations, the EA will have power to refuse, suspend or revoke permits and impose sanctions for permit breaches, including up to five years’ imprisonment.
Inflicting economic pain, in Duffy’s view, is the most effective way to shut down waste criminals. “What would really hurt a waste criminal economically is the loss of their ability to trade in waste…that would be achieved by essentially cutting them out of the waste system by removing their permits: they could neither accept waste nor move it anywhere.”
Use of other technologies to help trace and monitor waste and operations includes automatic number plate recognition, as well as drones and plane-based remote sensing to investigate and understand sites. These, in conjunction with other measures, are useful in early detection of illegal sites and activity. But Duffy has said improvement in the quality of EA data systems was still needed.
“What I cannot currently do is look at suspicious changes from drone aircraft imagery before I have a report and see whether something needs to be investigated. I cannot currently pull in data from the Land Registry and think ‘that’s a suspicious transaction’. We could build a system that could do that quite straightforwardly, and we have partners who can help us do that.” Data and intelligence still need to be improved.
As the EA’s 10-point plan states: “Waste crime is complex to track and challenging to address…But we are making progress, and we are determined to build on it.” There have been several developments on tackling waste crime in recent months – now momentum needs to be maintained to achieve progress.