The Environment Agency is ‘spread too thin’ and lacks powers to tackle waste crime, an influential group of MPs has said.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warned that the Environment Agency is not set up to effectively deal with illegal waste dumping, blaming gaps in its powers and intelligence gathering.
The Committee also criticised the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) for a lack of strategic direction that, it said, limits the regulators’ ability to plan or target resources effectively.
The PAC also said the Environment Agency was restricted to the ‘lengthy and expensive route’ of criminal prosecutions without the option of enforcing civil powers against illegal waste sites.
The report produced by PAC comes the week after Defra published its waste crime action plan that promised an additional £45 million to the Environment Agency for waste crime enforcement.
The funding will be spread over three years and is on top of a previously announced £5.6 million increase to the Environment Agency’s enforcement budget.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said regulators are ‘drowning in recommendations from multiple reviews’.
“Our report finds that the current position is that regulators are not sufficiently resourced to follow this multiplicity of recommendations, while still carrying out their responsibilities towards the environment,” Clifton-Brown said.
As a solution, the PAC said that Defra should explore merging the regulatory responsibilities of Natural England and the Environment Agency.
Clifton-Brown continued: “Whilst they do have slightly different roles in regulating the environment, some of their larger functions, such as monitoring the planning system and taking enforcement action, significantly overlap.”
“A single culture would be able to more coherently face outwards towards sectors that need to engage.”
As part of its waste crime action plan, Defra announced a suite of new measures, including new ‘police-style’ powers for enforcement officers.
However, the PAC’s report said that the new measures were not well-coordinated, and questioned whether the Environment Agency has the ‘resources and skills’ to manage the upcoming changes.
A separate inquiry by the House of Lords said it was 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 were also critical of the police, saying they were ‘unimpressed’ with the lack of interest they showed in tackling waste crime.