Landfill Tax Fraud
Debate between Kevan Jones and Aaron Bell(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Mr Jones
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for this intervention. The frustration is that we do not need new legislation; we just need Government action to fund and implement the existing powers.
My next point, which will also affect the hon. Gentleman’s part of the United Kingdom, is about the effect on local communities. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist), the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) and the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden will mention specific examples from their constituencies of where local communities feel powerless to stop the huge environmental damage being done to the area. However, this is not down to any lack of trying by those right hon. and hon. Members, who have campaigned for change for many years.
The PAC report estimates that the cost of landfill tax fraud and waste crime is about £1 billion a year. However, that figure is just like me sticking my finger in the air, because basically no one knows. That is a conservative estimate, and the reason for that, as the report says, is that we have basically given up trying to monitor what is happening.
How does landfill tax fraud work in practice? There are strands to it. The first is the way in which the tax was implemented. There are two rates, and those rates went up between 2008 and 2014. The rate for inert or inactive waste is currently £3.15 a tonne, and the standard for ordinary waste is £98.60 a tonne. The first element of criminality involves saying that waste is inert when it is not. There is no monitoring at all, so people are instantly making a fortune by avoiding taxation. The incentive for misdescription of waste is the huge gap between the two rates. The Environment Agency does not really enforce this, and I am sure that boreholes would reveal that inert-waste only sites will contain other waste. The problem is that we do not know what is in such sites, which is a future environmental problem.
The second strand is illegal sites without a licence, for which there are no real sanctions. People can buy a field or an old quarry and keep filling it, and they do not pay any landfill tax.
The next method is far more sophisticated, whereby criminal elements buy or set themselves up as legitimate waste operators. Is that easy? It is, because there are no restrictions on who can become a waste operator. If someone buys an existing business or a quarry, they can label it and say they are going to collect waste, but who is checking? People can run two scams. They can declare active waste as inert, and they can just declare half of what they are putting in.
Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for securing this debate. He is absolutely right that someone with no qualifications can set up or, indeed, take over a site, and there will be no checks as to whether they are fit and proper. They could have a criminal record within the waste sector itself, as was the case at Walleys Quarry in my constituency. The Environment Agency appears powerless to do anything to stop such people operating landfills.
Aaron Bell
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. That has been a significant problem in Newcastle. There have been accidents on the road outside the landfill caused by lorries backing up along the road. Firms opposite have complained that people have had problems accessing their businesses. An arrangement has been recently made through a variation to the planning permission to allow vehicles on to the site before the 7 am opening time so that they can at least queue on the site rather than on the road. There is also state of the road and the mud that some vehicles have left on it. There is a wheel wash that vehicles are supposed to go through when they leave. It is clear that it has not always been working. The county council has had to write on more than one occasion to the operator demanding that it cleans up the local roads as well. Traffic and the state of the roads are significant issues, and I wish the hon. Gentleman well with his efforts to represent the people of Reading in the situation with the incinerator to which he refers. The impact is not just about odour; it is about the whole operation and its interference with people’s quality of life in the surrounding villages.
As I was saying, there have been far too many breaches and they are still ongoing. Even under intense scrutiny, with four monitoring stations and regular Environment Agency visits—including unannounced visits, which I welcome—the operator is still being found responsible for more and more breaches. I pay particular tribute to Stop the Stink campaigner Dr Mick Salt, who has brought several such breaches to the public’s attention via freedom of information requests.
The operator’s continual failure to comply with the conditions of its permit, even under such intense scrutiny, is staggering. It surely only strengthens the case for stripping it of the permit altogether when the investigation concludes. I will continue to fight for my constituents and fight to ensure that the operator and the EA are both fully held to account and that we get some appropriate action in response to the misery that the landfill has visited on Newcastle-under-Lyme residents, particularly those who live closest.
Let me turn more specifically to the subject of today’s debate: landfill tax fraud, to which I referred in the Westminster Hall last February. The problem, as I said in my intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden, is that bad firms are driving good ones out of the industry. I have spoken to legitimate operators in Stoke-on-Trent who are upset that they are trying to do an honest job but cannot compete with the firms undercutting them.
Fundamentally, most people will take assurances from firms that say, “Of course we’ll handle your waste legitimately, don’t worry about that—and here’s a nice price for you.” A lot of people will be guided by that, so the regulator needs to step in. People need confidence that a regulated firm will be regulated. They should not need incentives to go to one firm or another because of ethical considerations; they should be able to trust that any firm in a regulated space is operating honestly and ethically.
As we heard from the right hon. Member for North Durham, the landfill tax differential has gone up to more than £95 per tonne. When the charge was first introduced in 1996, there was only a £5 differential; the rates were £2 and £7. I welcome the fact that landfill tax has reduced the overall amount of waste going to landfill, but it has obviously created strong incentives for misdescription.
Not only is standard waste being misdescribed as inert, but waste is going to landfill that should not be there at all. In the debate last February, we heard examples from a journalist’s research that included cavity wax, arsenic, zinc and even rat poison going into Walleys Quarry. I know that those allegations have been put to the Environment Agency and I am sure that they will be part of the criminal investigation, so I do not want to comment further on them today, but the problem is that charging £100 a tonne for waste is increasingly incentivising misdescription.
Mr Kevan Jones
It never ceases to amaze me that these things happen even when the Environment Agency understands the problem. I referred earlier—I was racking my brains for the figures—to fires at waste transfer stations and landfill sites, which are another way in which operators get round the regulations. Burning waste to get rid of it is a common practice, but the Environment Agency just seems to turn a blind eye. Not only is there an effect on the environment when operators burn what they should not be burning, but they avoid landfill tax.
Aaron Bell
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. With illegal landfill sites in particular, we can almost rely on there being a suspicious arson attack. Getting the fire services involved is often the quickest way to get these problems resolved, because operators know that they and not the Environment Agency will ultimately be the ones involved in cleaning up. My constituency also has a notorious illegal waste dump at Doddlespool farm; I do not want to detain the House for too long, but we have seen all these things going on, with all sorts of impacts on the environment from vermin and all the rest of it.
Fly-tipping is forecast to have probably the greatest overall financial impact, although it is very difficult to get the numbers. The national tax gap for HMRC overall is estimated at 5.1%, but the landfill tax gap was 17.1% in 2020-21 and in previous years it has been more than 20%. That is equivalent to £125 million, which is only a part of the overall billion-pound estimate of the cost of waste crime. That does not even really take into account the cost of fly-tipping; it is about tax that should have been collected but has not. Things that are completely illegal fall somewhat outside the tax gap calculations, as I understand it.
Aaron Bell
I could not agree more. I cannot remember who it was who mentioned the Environment Agency earlier, but there has been a cultural problem with enforcement, and I should like to see HMRC step up and assist. There is a long tradition of the taxman being the man who catches perpetrators of organised and serious crime in the end, but it is not happening with waste crime. I shall say more about that later.
In a statement to the House on the 18th report of the Public Accounts Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) said that Jim Harra had assured the Committee that the tax gap was so large because the scope of landfill tax had been widened to include illegal waste sites. However, if fly-tipping were taken into account, it might be even larger. The summary of the report stated:
“Waste crime is known to be greatly under-reported, so the true scale and impact of the problem are even larger than official data suggest.”
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden just pointed out, that is just the financial cost; we are not remotely taking into account the cost in terms of the impact on people’s quality of life. Perhaps if we do get a class action lawsuit, some financial numbers will be attributed to that in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Mr Kevan Jones
Another area in which some action is belatedly being taken is the export of waste, which not only avoids tax but causes environmental disasters in some developing countries.
Aaron Bell
The right hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. Indeed, as I mentioned last February in connection with Walleys Quarry, there was a suggestion that waste that should have been exported for treatment in, I believe, the Netherlands was actually going straight into landfill. Export adds an extra layer of complexity for the Environment Agency and HMRC to get on top of, but get on top of it they must, because these operators are using all the tricks in the book to get their waste dealt with as cheaply as possible and maximise their profits.
When it comes to social cost, misclassified waste is, according to the EA, the most likely result of the smell at Walleys Quarry landfill, driven primarily by hydrogen sulphide created by the biodegradation of gypsum. The awful impact of that has been experienced by my constituents time and again. It was exacerbated during lockdown, when the smell was at its worst, but when we opened up again, people did not want to come into the town centre and use our pubs, bars and cafes, or even just do their shopping, because of the awful odour.
I have mentioned the health impacts, but there is also the long-term environmental unknown risk of waste going into landfill. We do not know exactly what is in Walleys Quarry; if the reports from journalists are to be believed, there could be all sorts of things in there. I have been given assurances that it is unlikely to cause any risk, given that it is all capped off, but not knowing what is in the ground is not a great state of affairs. The site should have been properly regulated ever since the permission was granted by John Prescott back in 1998.
I am conscious that I have been speaking for a while, so I will end my speech shortly. We need to look at what is being done, but also at what more needs to be done. The Public Accounts Committee report stated that action was being taken, but I believe it is taking place too slowly. We have seen the establishment of the joint waste crime unit, but we have not seen enough activity on the back of it. We have also seen helpful reports from the National Audit Office highlighting the severity of the problem. I understand that the Government accepted all the recommendations of the PAC report and will implement them, but we need to see a response to the HMRC landfill tax call for evidence. We do not know yet what will happen with that, but it needs to be structured in such a way that it achieves its legitimate aim of reducing the amount of waste going to landfill without incentivising people to take shortcuts.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the EA and HMRC clearly need to work with relevant bodies within the criminal justice system to develop a plan for making enforcement more effective across the full spectrum of waste crime. That must include speeding the process up and—this is very important—consideration of whether the sentencing guidance needs to be strengthened. The inadequacy of the fines issued to companies and individuals is all too apparent. People who are doing tens or hundreds of pounds’ worth of damage—and that does not even allow for the social cost—are being hit with only hundreds of thousands of pounds-worth of fines, and there are very few cases in which people go to prison.
On top of that, we need to consider whether the bonds put up by operators are sufficient. The Environment Agency is worried about operators walking away precisely because it knows that the money put up in bonds is not sufficient for a local authority to ameliorate a site. We have had that exact discussion in Staffordshire about what would happen if the operator walked away from Walleys Quarry. Who would be on the hook for it, and how would we manage it? I pay tribute to the work done by councils to prepare for that potential eventuality, but it should not have to be like that. There should be enough money in the bond to fund the amelioration, if necessary.
It is clear from my many discussions with the Environment Agency that many of its officers agree there is a fundamental lack of deterrence. I am critical of the Environmental Agency’s culture, and I think it was far too slow to react when the problem got worse, but there is a feeling that people are getting away with it because they do not feel deterred by the sanctions. We need to look at that, too.
We need much tougher fines and the prospect of lengthy prison terms, and there needs to be a fit and proper person test for people seeking to operate landfills, whether they are setting one up or taking over a licence. All the agencies need to work together to deter waste crime and landfill tax fraud. I have often spoken to DEFRA Ministers about this, and I appreciate that a Treasury Minister is here because this debate is an HMRC issue, but I look forward to what he has to say about tackling landfill tax fraud, and waste crime more generally.
Given HMRC’s case load, it might look like there is more to be gained by working elsewhere, but we are losing out on hundreds of millions of pounds of tax, and on millions or billions of pounds of additional social cost. It is an incalculable loss that ordinary people who want to dispose of their waste cannot trust the sector, because they do not know whether their waste will be disposed of legally or illegally.
Some blue chip names deposed of their waste at Walleys Quarry. They were appalled to be identified as having done so by the reporting of journalists, and they stopped sending their waste there. No blame necessarily attaches to them, but it shows that, overall, the sector cannot be trusted.
There is a tradition, going back to Al Capone, of the taxman being the one who finally holds serious organised criminals to account. HMRC must step up and give the Environment Agency a helping hand, because the crimes with which HMRC can charge people carry much more serious financial consequences and, potentially, jail time. If HMRC learned the lessons of Operation Nosedive and looked to prosecute people for waste crime, it would be greatly appreciated by me, by my constituents and, I am sure, by the constituents of all hon. Members here today.