Landowner
carries the can on illegal waste
An illegal
waste wood stockpile on land in Devon has seen the landowner prosecuted and
left with the clean-up bill after being held responsible for knowingly
permitting the tenants’ activities.
The tenants had leased
the land for a wood recycling business, but none of the material that arrived
on the site ever left, creating a 10,000-tonne stockpile covering the area of a
football pitch. When the stockpile was destroyed in a
massive fire which burned for five days, the Environment Agency prosecuted not
just the tenants, but the landlord as well.
The action
saw the landowner, Anthony Joyner from Totnes, fined £3,600 and ordered to pay
£5,000 costs after pleading guilty to knowingly permitting the keeping of
controlled waste on land where no environmental permit was in force, an offence
under the Environmental Protection Act 1990.
The Fire Service fought the blaze for five days and Joyner was ordered
to pay the Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service compensation of
£4,250.
The site was a disused plant nursery which had a 1,000-tonne
waste exemption. Waste disposal or
recovery operations are either regulated, requiring an
environmental permit, or exempt which do not require a
permit, but are generally small-scale waste operations with a set limit, as in
this case. If the exemption limit is
exceeded on a site and no permit is obtained, the operator will be in breach of
the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations (2016) and have committed
an offence.
Waste movements must be recorded and while there was no audit
trail for most of the waste wood at the Cockwells Nursery site, the Environment
Agency managed to obtain enough waste transfer notes from local companies to
prove the site’s exemption limit of 1,000 tonnes had been exceeded and the
business was operating illegally.
Said Dafydd Roberts,
Regulatory expert with Gamlins Law : “We are seeing a much tighter approach to pollution control and performance in
the waste sector. The Department for the
Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has recently announced a
strengthening of the Environment Agency’s powers to raise standards within
waste processing. They are also consulting
on changes to the waste exemption regime to prevent it being used to hide waste
crime, so things will only become tighter.
“This is not the first time that a landlord has been held
responsible for knowingly permitting illegal activities by an operator and the
courts are making it clear that knowingly
means simply knowing that a waste operation is being carried out, not
necessarily that it is unlawful, and permitting
means failing to prevent, so ignorance is no defence.”
He added: “Even tougher for landowners is that where an occupier
stops trading and abandons waste, then there may be a further offence of
knowingly permitting the storage of that waste, which continues unless and
until the site is cleared. Regulators
have powers to serve notices on landowners requiring the clearance of
unlawfully deposited or stored waste and failure to comply can also result in prosecution.
“It means that any prospective or existing tenants who are
operating in any waste-related activity need to be subject to due diligence
beforehand and then monitored carefully during the tenancy. All licences and permits need to be checked
at the outset, and then regularly reviewed, including being sure that proper
auditing of waste movements is going on.
If waste is coming in, but not going out, then warning bells should
sound.”
This is not legal
advice; it is intended to provide information of general interest about current
legal issues.
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