Waste Management Carriers: Regulation

Lord Harper Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

As has been mentioned, Bickershaw and other sites have been an absolute disgrace and a blight on local communities. That is why we are bringing in all the different initiatives I talked about within the waste action plan, why we are trying to give the Environment Agency more power and more ability to make arrests, and why we are looking at how to stop this at source. This is not going to be solved simply; we need to make sure that we tackle it from all sides. Whatever Administration we have going forward will be absolutely committed to do that, I am sure.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, to follow up on the Minister’s answer to the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, he perfectly properly trumpeted increased prosecution and enforcement statistics, but those are meaningful only if we know how big a proportion of the whole problem they represent. What confidence does she have that the Environment Agency has the data to properly understand the scale of this problem so that we can test whether the enforcement measures taken are dealing with the problem effectively?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

That is a really good question. This is why we are also bringing in digital waste tracking, as without that we do not know how much waste we are talking about. That will create a digital record for every new consignment of hazardous and non-hazardous waste, with a few pragmatic exceptions, and enable us to track every such consignment and know exactly how much we are dealing with and what is going missing. That should make a big difference.