UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg appears to have seriously underestimated the true cost of waste crime. When launching the Liberal Democrat Party’s Zero Waste Bill earlier this month, Clegg announced that fly-tipping and landfill tax evasion costs the UK taxpayer an average of £500m a year in lost revenue.
Proskips, a nationwide skip hire company said the latest data from the government’s Environment Agency reveals that waste crime diverts up to £1bn from legitimate business and the Treasury each year. “We have spent around £16.5m stopping waste crime, with an estimated return of £92.5m,” the EA reports in Regulating the Waste Industry: 2013 Evidence Summary.
The figure Clegg chose to quote when launching his party’s war on environmental vandalism comes from a report commissioned by the Environmental Services Association Education Trust that was released last year.
That research estimates the cost of waste crime to be between £324m and £808m, with a best estimate of £568m, caused by loss of revenue for legal waste sites, tax evasion where, for example, hazardous waste is deliberately classified as standard, and the clean-up costs of fly-tipping.
The Zero Waste Bill is just one of five green laws the Lib Dems want to introduce should Clegg’s party remain in government after the general election on 7 May, but steps to target waste offenders through tougher enforcement powers have already been taken.
Resource Management Minister Dan Rogerson announced new legislation earlier this month that will enable local authorities to stop, search and seize vehicles suspected of being involved in waste crime.
The new powers, which are expected to be in force from 6 April, also involve broadening the range of waste offences for which a vehicle can be seized by enforcement authorities to include:
- Breaching the waste duty of care.
- Operating an illegal waste site.
- Carrying controlled waste without authorisation.
And under plans published for consultation by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Welsh government at the start of March, environmental regulators in England and Wales would be given tougher powers to target waste offenders.
The proposals would give regulators the power to suspend waste permits if an operator fails to comply with an enforcement notice – even if the ‘risk of serious pollution’ test is not met.
Other proposals in the consultation document include giving regulators the power to:
- Prevent or remedy pollution even where an environmental permit is not in place.
- Start a High Court action to secure compliance with enforcement, suspension or other notices, whether or not the regulator has taken other enforcement steps. Currently, a regulator needs to demonstrate it has given due consideration to the use of criminal proceedings before taking proceedings to the High Court.
- Take physical steps to prevent further breaches of the regulators, for example by physically stopping waste coming onto sites.
- Remove a risk of serious pollution at a facility, regardless of circumstances.
While the focus of the consultation is on providing enhanced powers to the regulators to tackle waste crime, the governments is also seeking views on further measures to tackle “entrenched poor performance” in the waste management industry, which could include site management plan legislation or the introduction of fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping.
