The government says waste criminals now have "no hiding place" after digital reporting became compulsory for more than 12,000 permitted waste sites in England.
The system that started on 1 October does not yet track the whole waste chain compulsorily. Waste carriers, brokers and dealers are due to get public access to the next part of the service from spring 2027. They will not be required to use it until October 2027. Defra's own implementation guidance describes the current system as the first stage of a phased rollout towards more complete tracking from end to end.
For now, permitted receiving sites must report the loads arriving through their gates in near real time, including details of the carrier and the classification of the waste. The Environment Agency says that will allow it to identify suspicious differences between waste movements and receipts, check whether sites are taking more waste than their permits allow and investigate carriers associated with questionable loads. That gives regulators more information than the paper system it replaces, though it does not yet amount to mandatory digital reporting from the point at which waste is collected.
Defra's timetable puts carriers, brokers and dealers into private testing from autumn 2026, public beta from spring 2027 and mandatory use from October next year. The government estimates there are around 300,000 registered carriers, brokers and dealers, compared with roughly 12,000 waste site operators.
The House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee made the same distinction when it examined the regulations earlier this year, describing them as establishing the first phase of the tracking system and saying further secondary legislation would be needed before the system was fully operational.
There is currently no single comprehensive record following waste through the system, and regulators have long argued that fragmented paperwork makes it harder to identify illegal sites, misclassified waste, flytipping and unlawful exports. The Government Digital Service gave the project for carriers a green assessment at its alpha stage in July.
Government documents continue to cite an estimated cost of around £900 million a year in England. The underlying figure is £924 million for 2018/19, produced in a 2021 study commissioned by the Environmental Services Association and carried out by Eunomia.
That estimate included £392 million attributed to flytipping, £236 million to illegal waste sites and £120 million to waste misclassification and fraud, along with illegal exports, permit and exemption breaches and enforcement costs.
The National Audit Office noted in 2022 that Defra, the Environment Agency and the Treasury were using the £924 million estimate because there was no official government estimate of the economic cost of waste crime. It also said the figure rested on broad assumptions and weak data about the true scale of offending.
Four years later, the Regulatory Policy Committee raised the age of that evidence again. Its May 2026 review said Defra's impact assessment would have benefited from examining how the cost of waste crime had changed since the 2018/19 baseline.
The RPC nevertheless judged the impact assessment fit for purpose. It validated an equivalent annual net direct cost to business of £40.8 million. The estimated business net present value over the appraisal period is negative £174.1 million. Once wider benefits are included, Defra's preferred option has a positive overall net present value of £172.1 million, a modelled projection rather than a realised saving.
The RPC specifically cautioned that the benefits could be overstated because Defra had quantified some costs that would exist in the baseline without assigning equivalent quantified benefits to that baseline. It also asked for better evidence supporting the unusually long life of 15 years assumed for the IT system.
Defra's assessment says 71.5 per cent of businesses in scope are microbusinesses and another 21.5 per cent are small businesses. The RPC accepted the department's argument that exempting them would leave large gaps in the data, but noted that relatively fixed software and transition costs would weigh more heavily on smaller firms.
Defra intends to review the policy formally in 2031, five years after the legislation begins to take effect, examining both the impact on waste crime and the costs borne by legitimate businesses.
The Environment Agency says the first phase will give it better information about what reaches permitted sites and which carriers delivered it. Mandatory reporting at the point of collection, covering the much larger population of carriers, brokers and dealers, is scheduled for October 2027.