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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the Environment Agency's licensing, monitoring and enforcement of the law on the dumping of waste materials.

The Environment Agency regulates legitimate waste operations through a series of permits or registrations and they carry out regular monitoring of all these activities. They have effective systems to focus regulatory effort on the poor performing, high risk sites and activities. In 2016 over 92% of the 14,000 regulated demonstrated good compliance and were rated in the highest compliance bands.

The Environment Agency manages a 24-hour incident hotline and records all reports of large scale illegal dumping and illegal waste sites. They also have teams of intelligence officers and a specialist crime unit, who gather and act on intelligence reports. These are used to target higher risk crime and organised criminals.

The Environment Agency has a target to close down 45% of illegal sites within 90 days and every year stops more than 900 illegal sites from operating. In the financial year 2016/2017 they brought 138 prosecutions against businesses and individuals for waste crime offences, yielding more than £2 million in fines.

They continue to explore innovative ways of preventing and disrupting criminal activity, extending their enforcement powers and working with many partner organisations including the Police and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.