Say hello to the UK’s most successful growth industry: organised waste crime | George Monbiot
This country is a dump. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean it literally. From the point of view of criminal waste processing gangs, this is a huge potential dump. The chances of being caught range from minimal to non-existent, and the penalties are mostly laughable. Successive governments have given criminals the right to print money.
Last week the House of Commons public accounts committee said illegal waste dumping was “out of control”. The UK now has between 8,000 and 13,000 illegal dump sites. Most consist of a few truckloads. Some contain tens of thousands of tons of waste, which can include household products, asbestos, heavy metals and highly toxic, flammable and explosive organic chemicals. Waste spreads through neighborhoods, flows into rivers, and seeps into soil and groundwater. And in most cases, nothing is done.
This is not a problem, but the inevitable result of a sustained ideological attack on regulation. Governments view essential public protections as “red tape” that must be cut, and regulators as “checkers and blockers” that must be defeated. But ministers cannot simply remove protections from legislation, for fear of provoking public fury. Instead, they cut funding for monitoring and enforcement: deregulation by stealth. The result, over the past 15 years, has been the creation of an entirely new industry sector almost from scratch: organized waste crime. This is perhaps our most successful growth area.
It’s a great deal. Someone who wants their waste removed pays you a fee to cover transportation, landfill tax, and entry fees to an official disposal site. But instead of putting them in an approved landfill, you dump them on farmland, in nature reserves in ancient woodland, across country lanes or even, as in Bickershaw, near Wigan, on the green space next to a primary school. You pocket the difference: around £2,500 per semi-trailer load. Anyone can play, as I discovered when I registered my deceased goldfish with the Environment Agency as a top-tier waste dealer.
The chances of being caught are so low and the profits so high that waste dumping, as the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee reports, has become a “gateway” to organized crime, creating networks which then branch out into drugs, weapons, money laundering, fraud and modern slavery. Waste crime is changing the character of the country, both socially and physically.
Regulators are so underfunded, demoralized and completely useless that, even in the rare cases where they have opened investigations and prosecutions, the dumping has continued. This is what happened in Bickershaw, where an illegal dump of 25,000 tonnes forced the closure of the primary school, filled the area with rats and flies, damaged residents’ businesses and ruined their lives. Residents first reported the spill in late 2024. Eventually, the Environment Agency launched what it called a “major criminal investigation”. But in mid-February this year, drone footage showed that activity at the site continued: the agency, the municipality and the police had failed to secure it.
It’s the same story almost everywhere. When the first trucks began arriving on the banks of the River Cherwell, north of Oxford, in the summer of 2025, local fishermen, neighbors and landowners reported them. The Environment Agency’s response was to issue “a cease and desist order”. But that was all. Not only did he fail to block the entrance, but he did not even install a surveillance camera to monitor the activity and identify the culprits. Not surprisingly, the trucks continued to arrive. Only a few months later, the Environment Agency secured the site, and in the meantime a 20,000 tonne mountain of waste, sliding into the river, had become a “critical incident”.
In Hoad’s Wood, Kent, a “strictly protected” ancient woodland, residents reported in 2020 that several hectares of trees had been illegally cleared: dumpers were preparing their site. The authorities did not react. Between 2020 and 2023, gangsters deposited more than 30,000 tonnes of construction and household waste there. Local people provided authorities with images of the dump and even the names of the companies involved. Nothing happened. It was not until January 2024 that the Environment Agency imposed a restriction measure on the site, and it was not until February 2025 that three men were arrested. As Kent’s Police and Crime Commissioner told a House of Lords inquiry, people “report it to the borough council, who will tell them to report it to the police, who will tell them to report it to the Environment Agency, who will tell them to report it to the council, who will tell them to report it to the police. They will keep going around in circles, and no one cares.” Now the clean-up operation will cost taxpayers £15million.
That’s deregulation for you. This is yet another example of the strangely unbalanced version of “budgetary discipline” adopted by successive governments, which takes into account the costs of action, but not the costs of inaction. A conservative estimate is that illegal dumping costs the English economy £1 billion a year. The cost of cleaning up all the criminal deposits accumulated over the past 15 years will, if it ever happens, run into the tens of billions. This is before taking into account the potential contamination of aquifers by infiltration of toxic waste, the costs and impacts of which could be much greater. And it’s all because of cuts, saving a tiny fraction of those costs, inflicted on regulators in the name of “efficiency.”
Two weeks ago, the government published its “action plan against waste crime”. Some measures are welcome, but they in no way match the scale of the crisis. It allocates an extra £15 million a year to tackle waste crime: a simple wooden sword to wield against the vast organized crime networks that have grown in a regulatory vacuum. This also represents the cost of cleaning just one of the 8,000 sites: Hoad’s Wood. Everything this plan proposes is undermined by the Prime Minister’s ongoing deregulatory agenda, which also appears to be “out of control.”
Underfunding and deregulation, now in its fifth decade, are destroying our country. They ensure that we cannot solve our problems, spreading despair and passivity. They open the door to economic mafias and political profiteers exploiting poverty and despair. There could hardly be a more powerful symbol of dysfunction and neglect than the trash that accumulates around us. The literal dump becomes metaphorical.
