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This country’s a dump. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. From the point of view of criminal waste gangs, it is one big potential landfill. The chances of being caught range between minimal and nonexistent, and the penalties are mostly laughable. Successive governments have given criminals a licence to print money.
Last week, the Commons public accounts committee reported that illegal waste dumping is “out of control”. The UK is now blighted with between 8,000 and 13,000 illegal waste sites. Most consist of a few lorry loads. Some contain tens of thousands of tonnes of waste, which might incorporate everything from household products to asbestos, heavy metals and highly toxic, flammable and explosive organic chemicals. The rubbish blows through local neighbourhoods, flows into rivers and seeps into soil and groundwater. And, in most cases, nothing is done.
This is no glitch, but the inevitable result of a sustained ideological assault on regulation. Governments treat essential public protections as “red tape” that must be slashed, and regulators as “checkers and blockers” who must be vanquished. But ministers cannot simply delete protections from the statute books, for fear of provoking public fury. So instead they cut the funds for monitoring and enforcement: deregulation by stealth. The result, over the past 15 years, has been to build a whole new industrial sector almost from scratch: organised waste crime. It is perhaps our most successful growth industry.
It’s great business. Someone who wants their waste removed pays you a fee to cover transit, landfill tax and the gate charges at an official disposal site. But instead of taking it to a registered landfill, you dump it on farmland, on nature reserves in ancient woodlands, across country lanes or even, as in Bickershaw, near Wigan, on the green space next to a primary school. You pocket the difference: about £2,500 per articulated lorry load. Anyone can play, as I discovered when I registered my deceased goldfish with the Environment Agency as an upper-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 organised crime, creating networks that then branch into drugs, guns, money laundering, fraud and modern slavery. Waste crime is changing the character of the country, socially as well as physically.
So underfunded, demoralised and utterly useless have the regulators become that, even in some of the rare cases in which they’ve begun investigations and prosecutions, the dumping has continued. This is what has happened at Bickershaw, where a 25,000-tonne illegal tip has forced closures of the primary school, filled the neighbourhood with rats and flies, damaged local people’s businesses and ruined their lives. Locals first reported the dumping 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, council and 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 summer 2025, local anglers, neighbours and landowners reported them. The Environment Agency’s response was to issue “a cease-and-desist order”. But that was it. Not only did it fail to block the entrance, it didn’t even install a trail camera to monitor the activity and identify the culprits. Unsurprisingly, the lorries kept coming. Only months later did the Environment Agency secure the site, by which time a 20,000-tonne waste mountain, slipping into the river, had become a “critical incident”.
At Hoad’s Wood in Kent, a “strictly protected” ancient woodland, locals reported in 2020 that several acres of trees had been illegally cleared: the dumpers were preparing their site. The authorities failed to respond. Between 2020 and 2023, the gangsters deposited more than 30,000 tonnes of construction and household waste there. Local people supplied the authorities with footage of the dumping and even the names of the companies involved. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until January 2024 that the Environment Agency imposed a restriction order on the site, and it was only in 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, which will tell them to report it to the police, who will tell them to report it to the Environment Agency, which will tell them to report it to the council, which will tell them to report it to the police. They will just keep going round and round and round, and no one cares.” Now the cleanup operation will cost taxpayers £15m.
That’s deregulation for you. It’s yet another instance of successive governments’ bizarrely lopsided version of “fiscal discipline”, which counts the costs of action, but not the costs of inaction. On a conservative estimate, illegal dumping costs the economy in England £1bn a year. The cost of cleaning up all the criminal dumps that have accumulated over the past 15 years will, if it ever happens, amount to tens of billions. This is before we take into account the potential contamination of aquifers by toxic waste seepage, whose costs and impacts could be many times greater. And it’s all because of the cuts, saving a tiny fraction of these costs, inflicted on regulators in the name of “efficiency”.
A fortnight ago, the government published its “waste crime action plan”. Some of the measures are welcome, but they in no way match the scale of the crisis. It allocates an extra £15m a year for waste crime enforcement: a mere wooden sword to wield against the vast organised crime networks that have grown in the regulatory vacuum. This also happens to be the cost of cleaning up just one of the 8,000 sites: Hoad’s Wood. Everything this plan proposes is undermined by the prime minister’s ongoing deregulation agenda, which also appears to be “out of control”.
Underfunding and deregulation, now in their fifth decade, are destroying our country. They ensure we cannot solve our problems, spreading hopelessness and passivity. They open the door to economic mafias and to political profiteers exploiting misery and despair. There could scarcely be a more potent symbol of dysfunction and neglect than the waste piling up around us. The literal dump becomes a metaphorical one.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
