The prevent and deter approach is a collaborative tactic used by the Environment Agency to crack down on waste crime. The organisation’s prevention and disruption manager Jo Holt explains.
The cost of waste crime in England alone is estimated to be more than £600m each year. Rogue operators undercut legitimate business, evade landfill tax and have a negative impact on the environment.
At the Environment Agency, I get to see first hand the impact waste criminals are having on people and places across England. Serious waste crime is big business, diverting millions of pounds every year from legitimate waste operators and HM Treasury.
Although always in the spotlight, the subject is evolving as waste criminals find new ways of evading legislation. Where there’s muck, there’s brass and nobody knows this better than the networks of waste criminals who work together across boundaries to benefit from what is an economic crime.
We can disrupt crime by making the environment for a waste criminal as hostile as possible. The aim is to divert offenders away from crime if the cost of committing it is greater than the benefit.
The Environment Agency invested £14.5m in addressing illegal waste sites between 2016 and 2018. On average, it costs more than £8,000 to close an illegal waste site, and more if we prosecute.
But this is not always enough to stop organised waste criminals, and doesn’t always result in the illegal waste being removed. The government’s Serious and Organised Crime Strategy recognised that, in some cases, other methods may be more successful.
Although a deterrent, prosecution is a reactive tool. Preventing crime in the first place will always be our ambition. We are increasingly focusing on preventing and deterring crime – an enforcement approach that aims to stop crime quickly and disrupt criminals through a variety of tactics and partnership approaches. Intelligence-led disruption techniques focus on the offender, rather than an individual site, and can be used to stop offending within a shorter timeframe and often more cheaply.
We can disrupt crime by making the environment for a waste criminal as hostile as possible. The aim is to divert offenders away from crime if the cost of committing it is greater than the benefit.
Interventions include: blocking access to land; stopping the source of waste; or seizing vehicles used to transport waste. Waste, labour, transport and land are all weaknesses on which we can focus.
Prosecution may be seen by some criminals as a business risk but, when their vehicles, money and property are taken away, the stakes suddenly seem a lot higher.
But the strength of this approach is in working with our partners. Waste criminals rarely commit just environmental crime, they engage in large-scale fraud, or they may be involved in the drugs trade or modern slavery. This means other law enforcers are likely to be interested in a partnership approach. Some of our best successes have been working with partners such as the DVSA, the police and HMRC.
Prosecution may be seen by some criminals as a business risk but, when their vehicles, money and property are taken away, the stakes suddenly seem a lot higher. Preventing waste falling into the wrong hands is essential, and raising awareness of a particular threat – using a variety of communications and social media messages to engage with key audiences – can be an effective prevention tool.
The purpose of our three new waste crime videos – aimed at householders, the end-of-life vehicle sector and landowners, property agents and landlords – is to raise awareness of environmental crime, so it’s more likely to be challenged and reported.
The video aimed at landowners and landlords, for example, shows how they can take action to avoid becoming a victim. We have seen cases where waste supposedly destined for legal disposal has been dumped on private premises, leaving them liable for disposal and clean-up, which can cost thousands of pounds. Raising awareness means the opportunity for criminals to rent land for dumping is reduced.
This opinion featured in the July / August issue of Circular.
For more EA videos, visit its YouTube page here. Watch the other waste crime videos here: Protect your land from fly-tippers : How to break down a vehicle withour causing pollution
