River Cherwell: Clearing Illegal Waste

Vikki Slade Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s assiduousness on the issue of Walleys Quarry. That site is also now being run by the Environment Agency, and the risk of odour that his constituents were really grievously suffering is now extremely low, but that has come at a cost, as he rightly says.

This is nothing new. When there is a problem and no action is taken and no new policy is created, these illegal businesses think, “Well, it’s a victimless crime, so I can carry on making money.” Then they tell their friends and, guess what, soon many flowers are blooming. But they are the wrong sort of flowers, and this creates incentives. Then of course, the legitimate businesses are like, “Hang on, why am I paying all these fees if all I need to do is buy a field, dig it up and dump stuff in it?” This creates disincentives for legitimate operators as well. I am only too aware of this. It was starting post-2016 when the then Government were focused on leaving the EU and the large international issues. I was chairing the Environmental Audit Committee at the time and I was always worried about what was going to happen to waste, including chemical waste, once we put up a border with our nearest neighbours.

Secondly, we will reform waste management and transport. Instead of the current light-touch registration system, it will now be a permitted system. We will move on from a system that was so lax that people were able to sign up Oscar the dead dog to be a waste carrier. Activists were doing that back in 2018-19, so we have known about these problems. Anyone can falsify a bit of paper. We will introduce tougher background checks for operators and tougher penalties for those who break the law.

We will also require vehicles that transport waste—the man with the van—to display their permit numbers on their vehicles and on their advertising, so service users can be reassured that their waste is being handled by an accredited business rather than criminals. The reform will introduce mandatory technical competence for all permit holders, meaning that anyone transporting or making decisions about waste will have to demonstrate that they are competent to do so, rather than simply just going on a register. Waste will be managed by authorised persons only and in a safe manner.

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I am fascinated and happy to hear what is being proposed. Will it be possible for members of the public to check an online database for that permit? When somebody picks something up from a house and shows their permit, people can feel quite vulnerable. Being able to go online and check the permit against the local authority or central database would give people a lot more confidence.

[Mary Creagh]

I will get back to the hon. Member on that, if I may. The point of a digital waste tracking system is that everything is digitised. The problem has been that it is a paper-based register, so how can people check it at the moment? My understanding is that the move is to a digital system, but I will get back to her. I do not want to mislead her or the House. Perhaps Box officials can enlighten us while I go through the third reform of the waste permit exemptions.

Thirdly, there are exemptions for three high-risk areas: end of life vehicles—that is, car scrappage—end of life tyres and scrap metal. Those exemptions have long caused problems and have been abused. We will replace them with a requirement for a full environmental permit for all those activities. We will introduce greater record keeping requirements for all waste exemption holders and impose controls on how exemptions can be managed at one site.

At the moment, there are seven waste exemptions: construction waste, preparatory treatments, treatment of waste wood, manual treatment, burning vegetation at the place of production only—that is essentially for farmers—storage in containers and storage in a safe place. As I have mentioned, we have increased the waste crime investigation unit budget. It now has 43 full-time staff.

People have often asked me about enabling the Environment Agency to use environmental permit income to tackle waste crime. Rules are set out by the Treasury in “Managing Public Money” about how the income raised by public bodies may be used. These rules ensure transparency to us as parliamentarians and ensure that fees and charges are not set higher than necessary to cover activity that should be properly funded from taxation. We instead look to innovative ideas, and the EA has consulted on the implementation of a 10% levy to generate a further £3.2 million of waste enforcement funding each year. That would enable a further 30% increase in enforcement activity to be targeted at activities identified by the EA as waste crime priorities. Those include tackling organised crime groups, increasing enforcement activity around specific areas of concern such as landfill sites, closing down illegal sites more quickly, using intelligence more effectively and delivering successful major criminal investigations.