Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of the Joint Unit For Waste Crime.

No formal assessment has been made but the Joint Unit for Waste Crime (JUWC) recently published its annual report for 2024-25 here. A copy is attached to this answer.

Since 2020, the JUWC has worked with over 130 partner organisations and led or attended over 300 multi-agency days of action resulting in over 170 associated arrests. In recent years, the JUWC has made significant progress aligning its approach to other criminal justice agencies to target organised crime groups. The work of the JUWC has received cross government support and the model is respected internationally.

We have increased the Environment Agency’s (EA) total budget for 2025-26, including the amount available to tackle waste crime. This will enable the EA to increase its frontline criminal enforcement resource in the JUWC and area environmental crime teams by 43 full time staff. This resource will be targeted at activities identified as waste crime priorities using enforcement activity data and criminal intelligence.