First of all, it’s important to state that INNSA support the UK Environment Agency (EA) both in terms of its existence and the role it plays. We recognise the good work done both on the ground and academically, as well as the good service, cooperation and contracts that we as a company have received over the years from professionals in several departments including permitting, water quality and flood management.

We also recognise that the EA is sadly underfunded relative to the functions we expect it to perform. As a country we don’t give enough respect or value to the environment and this is sadly reflected in the budgets of the EA, Canals and Rivers Trust and various other bodies.

None of the above means that we shouldn’t be able to disagree with individual decisions from the EA or criticise government policy as a whole.

As outlined in a previous blog, I feel landfill tax is not an ideal way to reduce the amount of waste produced in the UK. While it may reduce the amount of waste sent to legal UK landfill, it incentivises both offshoring of waste and also illegal waste dumping. Sadly, we have recently seen an egregious case of illegal tipping that the EA failed to control and which now threatens to cause major environmental damage.

The Guardian recently reported on a mountain of rubbish dumped next to the river Cherwell in Oxfordshire – waste which is already leaching into the river and could cause severe long-lasting damage to the river if not cleared quickly, yet the EA was made aware of illegal activity in July and claims to have taken action – although the site was not sealed off and the majority of the waste seen there was actually dumped in September.

Worryingly, this waste includes waste from primary schools and local authorities, who would ordinarily be expected to dispose of their waste through legitimate waste streams. This suggests that there is likely a level of criminal involvement in the legitimate waste sector and that waste crime has escalated to the point where institutional corruption may have occurred. We may be entering an era where there is one economy for the law-abiding and one that enriches criminals at the expense of the government and the environment – with as much as £1.6bn avoided in landfill tax.

The EA has said that it will not clear up the site, despite the risks to the river, but says that it will try to “ensure those responsible” for the dumping will clear it up. First of all, this is like refusing to get someone in to fix or board up a broken window on your house because after a criminal throws a brick through your window – it’s stubborn, unrealistic and ignores the potential further problems that will be caused by not sorting the problem now. Secondly, why would criminals comply with an order from the law courts? And how does the EA plan to access the funds of criminal gangs to fund a cleanup? Do they expect to find them in legitimate business bank accounts that have been untouched over the years that it took to investigate the crime? We see that even in the case of legitimate businesses, profits and assets are often long gone by the time anyone comes seeking legal redress and the companies simply fold, leaving the taxpayer on the hook – why is there any reason to suspect you can get hold of the proceeds of illegal dumping (unless the criminals made the same mistake as this poor chap, and left their bitcoin wallet in the dump!).

Worse than that, it’s symptomatic of what now seems to be the standard MO for the EA when such situations arise – which is inaction, pursuing criminals through the courts to ask them to cleanup, without adequate enforcement powers or funding – a strategy which is rarely effective, which results in situations worsening and becoming less manageable and more expensive to clean up when someone finally does something – which another Guardian article shows could be five years or even longer. If the mountain of rubbish is allowed to leach into the Cherwell for five years, the environmental damage could be multiplied massively.

But how is this anything to do with landfill tax?

Around 85% of total UK waste is generated in England. The legitimate waste sector is estimated to generate around £18 billion annually, with landfill tax bringing in an estimated £500 million each year – revenues which have been reducing for over ten years, despite the rates of tax having increased significantly since the tax was introduced.

Landfill tax has been increased several times since its introduction in 1996, when it was just £7 per tonne. From 2006 there were staged increases of £8 per year up to 2014 – by which time the tax had increased over 1,000% to £79 per tonne. Since 2014 the tax has increased roughly in line with inflation, until this year’s rise to £126 per tonne, yet 2013-15 marked the period when Landfill Tax brought in its highest take for the UK government of just over £1bn annually – a take which has steadily dropped off since then, to less than half that level, despite the volumes of waste produced in the UK remaining relatively steady between around 190-220 million tonnes per year.

The disparity can partly be explained by offshoring waste management – because of the high rate of tax and the value of land in the UK, it is often cheaper to send waste to be buried abroad, which both reduces the tax take and also often means waste being disposed of in places with less control over waste management – with illegal dumping taking place at industrial levels in Italy, Turkey and other areas, often carried out by organised crime groups.

In fact, the EA estimates that 35% of waste crime in the UK is committed by organised crime groups, with 38m tonnes of waste dumped illegally every year.  The more expensive it is to legitimately send material to landfill, the more incentive there is for criminals to illegally dump waste. I’m sure we’ve all seen the signs up on lamp posts and around towns which offer “Waste removal – cheaper than a skip” with an anonymous phone number and no business details. The chances are that these are openly advertising criminal waste gangs.

The EA’s own reporting on waste crime suggests that 20% of all waste may be managed illegally and a similar 20% of waste operators are thought to engage in some illegal activity, which suggests that it wouldn’t be difficult to find an organisation operating illegally, particularly given the fact that the EA provides licences to waste carriers, brokers and dealers. Yet it would seem that the EA does not have the budget, the resources (or possibly the motivation) to crack down.

Waste crime costs the taxpayer £1bn a year in cleanup and other costs – which means that the £500m receipts from landfill tax represents just half of the money spent cleaning up illegal waste activity – a figure that probably doesn’t factor in the loss of habitat and other environmental damage, including chemical pollution of ground water and rivers and probably doesn’t factor in the cost of known illegal waste dumps still waiting to be cleaned up at the taxpayer’s expense (oh, sorry, I mean sites that the EA will “ensure those responsible” for the dumps clear up themselves).

Landfill tax can be a good thing, disincentivising waste but it only works if adequate enforcement is in place to prevent waste crime (clearly not the case) and if there is adequate funding within the main producers / handlers of waste (particularly local authorities as shown here and the NHS) – because if not, the government is taking trifling sums in tax and losing larger sums elsewhere, while the legitimate waste sector haemorrhages money to unscrupulous actors (or choose to turn a blind eye when offered tipping costs that seem too good to be true).

The EA report also highlights that an estimated 27% of waste crime is reported and calls for more reporting of waste crime, but if the agency responsible can’t be seen to take meaningful action in the face of such flagrant and egregious breaches of waste laws, why would anyone report to them – especially you’re likely to be reporting serious organised criminals?

The long and short of it is that this site will have to be cleaned up, and if it’s not done soon, there will be knock-on consequences for the river as well as the site. What’s more, there are potentially as many as 8,000 to 13,000 more sites around the UK that have been used as illegal waste tips – all waiting to add to the cleanup costs, and all ruining the local environment in the meantime.

It’s past time for the EA to act, get this site and others like it cleaned up – and it’s time for the government to get real about the scale of this problem, invest more in the EA, enable (or change) their management, invest more in investigation, enforcement and cleanup activities and save millions of pounds every year – money taken away from organised crime gangs and returned to the legitimate waste sector.

Chris Oliver

Technical