George Monbiot really is a one, eh? Such a wag
This is true, this is also a problem:
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.
This is also true:
Successive governments have given criminals a licence to print money.
The error - and boy is it a biggie - is this:
This is no glitch, but the inevitable result of a sustained ideological assault on regulation.
For, no, that’s the wrong way around. Flytipping, the illegal rubbish dumps - with all of their problems and pollutions - are a result of regulation, not its absence. Why?
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
It is regulation that led to the landfill tax. It is regulation which led to the high gate charges at an official site. So, what is it that is leading to the profit margin from dumping? Regulation. As we’ve noted a number of times before it is the very driving up of the costs of legal disposal that are leading to the growth in illegal disposal.
Should people react this way? No but that’s also irrelevant in a certain sense. Do people react this way? Yes, clearly and obviously they do. So, what needs to be done to stop them?
George insists more clipboards, lanyards and prosecutions will stop it all. We’d suggest that’s not going to work - for it will only push up the profit margins of those willing to take the risks. Given our prejudices and predelictions - Hey, prices work! - we’d insist that lowering the cost of legal disposal is the only thing that will work.
The country has no shortage of holes in the ground - we extract more cubic metres of stuff each year than we have rubbish to put in holes - and the shortage is of licenced holes only. So, licence more holes, kill the landfill tax and thereby lower the costs of disposal enough that the margin, incentive, for illegal dumping disappears.
True, true, that will probably mean less of that recycling that’s so dear to George’s heart but most of that has to be subsidised. That is, loses us all money so there’d be a saving from that too.
Illegal dumping is a cost of our current legal disposal system, that legal system itself being just too expensive. As with everything else make supply cheaper and demand will rise. Make supply cheap enough and the incentive to litter the countryside will disappear. Which is what George wants, right?
Tim Worstall