The Environment Agency stopped 143 high-risk illegal waste sites in 2025, exceeding its target of 90, its annual report finds.
The Environment Agency has released its annual report and accounts for the financial year 2024 to 2025. As part of the report, the regulator highlighted its key achievements and challenges for the year.
One of its strategic aims for the year was to ‘cut waste crime’ and help develop a circular economy. It set itself the target of stopping 90 high-risk illegal waste sites, which it exceeded by stopping 143 sites.
The report comes after damning findings from a House of Lords inquiry into waste crime, which said it’s difficult to conclude that ‘incompetence’ at the Environment Agency has not been a factor in failures to prevent and effectively prosecute waste crime.
The Lords also said they were ‘deeply concerned’ about what the inquiry found was the ‘inadequacy’ of the current approach to tackling waste crime.
During the inquiry, the Lords heard that over 38 million tonnes of waste – enough to fill Wembley Stadium 35 times – is being illegally dumped each year, mainly by established organised crime groups involved in drugs, firearms, money laundering and modern slavery.
The House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee has now written to the Environment Secretary, Emma Reynolds, to explain the findings of their inquiry into waste crime. In the letter, the Lords said waste crime is ‘critically under-prioritised’.
As part of the inquiry’s recommendations, the Lords have called on the government to urgently commission an independent review of the current approach to waste crime.
Responding to the inquiry, the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management’s (CIWM) Dan Cooke said the government must treat tackling waste crime as a ‘definitive sector and societal priority’.
CIWM said it largely agreed with the findings from the inquiry, which concluded that serious and organised waste crime is currently under-prioritised relative to its significant impact, and that a root-and-branch review is required to tackle waste crime more effectively.