Thanks to a sustained ideological assault on regulation, our country has been turned into a literal dump
T
his 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.
