Contribution
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, on securing this debate and thank her both for her excellent leadership as the chair of the Environment and Climate Change Committee, of which I have the privilege to be a member, and for her comprehensive introduction to this topic. I also acknowledge the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for urging the committee to investigate waste crime.
The headline item on “Channel 4 News” on 26 January was the illegal dumping of an estimated 25,000 tonnes of waste on Bolton House Road, Bickershaw—it is near Wigan in Lancashire—to which the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, has already referred. A local resident described living near the dump as a “living hell”. Residents had asked for it to be cleared up for over a year, but no one had accepted responsibility—not the local authority, the Environment Agency or the landowner, the Duchy of Lancaster.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, said, residents on the whole fear to speak out because they are afraid of reprisals. However, one brave resident, Nicha Rowson, talked to “Channel 4 News” about the rats and flies in her house, as well as the foul stench emanating from the dump nearby. One of her children, who has special needs, has had to move out of the house because of the impact of the dump. As we have already heard, last year, the dump caught fire, causing a local primary school to close for over a week. Yet the Environment Agency has said that the site does not pose a sufficient level of risk to require urgent clean-up. Does the Minister agree with the Environment Agency?
On top of the human misery caused by waste crime, there are important impacts on the environment, including water pollution, air pollution and the destruction of habitats. We have already heard that waste crime costs the economy £1 billion per year, but that is an estimate—just an estimate—of the cost of clean-up, enforcement and lost revenue to legitimate businesses and the Exchequer; it does not include the cost to people or to nature. I therefore ask the Minister: does Defra have an estimate of the total cost of waste crime, including the impacts on human well-being and the environment?
I turn to the question of how much waste crime there is. We have heard that there are an estimated 38 million tonnes a year of waste crime, but we were also told that only 27% of waste crime is reported. I suspect that this may be one of Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns: if it is not reported, how do we know how much there is? Nevertheless, the Environment Agency told the BBC that 517 known dumps were still active at the end of last year, including 11 of the so-called super sites, such as the Kidlington site that we have heard about. However, if only around a quarter of sites are reported and known, there could be as many as 2,000 dumps in England, or one for every 25 square miles. Given these uncertainties, can the Minister tell us the Government’s estimate of the total number of sites and the level of uncertainty in that estimate?
If I were a careers adviser for an aspiring and ambitious young criminal, I would recommend waste crime as a career option worth serious consideration. I would point to the attractive features of waste crime. There is plenty of money to be made and there is a very low chance of getting caught. The Environment Agency received 24,000 reports of waste crime in the three years up to March 2025. Criminal investigations were opened for 1.3% of them, and there was a prosecution in 0.65% of cases. Even if you are caught, the penalties are generally light and can simply be priced into your business model. What is more, if you make a success of it, you might be able to graduate to become involved in international criminal gangs, with career openings in areas such as people trafficking, drugs and money laundering.
Sir James Bevan, the then CEO of the Environment Agency, said that one of the best ways to prevent waste crime was
“to change how criminals calculate the odds, by imposing much tougher penalties on them if caught. We would like to see much bigger fines (at present many serious criminals treat these as business expenses) and more use of confiscation of criminals’ assets. But in particular we would like to see more and longer prison sentences, which really concentrate the criminal mind”.
Does the Minister agree with Sir James Bevan’s assertion that this is simply too easy and profitable for criminals? As things stand, the deterrents for waste crime are inadequate and are not being properly enforced.