Why not, umm, lower the cost of legal waste disposal?

This certainly seems like a big problem:

Philip Duffy, the agency’s chief executive, said: “Waste crime is toxic. Criminals’ thoughtless actions harm people, places, and the economy, blighting our communities and disrupting legitimate businesses.

“We’re determined to bring these criminals to justice through tough enforcement action and prosecutions. That’s why we support the government’s crackdown on waste criminals, which will ensure we have the right powers to shut rogue operators out of the waste industry.”

Anything that forces someone to froth at the mouth quite that much must be important, yes?

Reed said: “Waste criminals and fly-tippers who blight our towns and villages have gone unpunished for too long. That ends today. The government is calling time on fly-tipping. I will not stand by while this avalanche of rubbish buries our communities.

“Waste crime is trashing communities across the country. Fly-tipping has skyrocketed by a fifth while the number of prosecutions has fallen by the same amount since 2018-19.

“The failure to punish these criminals has left our high streets, roads and countryside buried under an avalanche of rubbish.”

Well, yes, clearly.

But what is it that should be done?

We do find it amusing that the flytippers vehicles are to be crushed. That seems like, erm, waste to us. If the vehicles are valuable why not sell them on - after confiscation - as valuable vehicles rather than crushing them and making them waste that has to be, erm, disposed of? But then the passion on display here might be enough that ratiocination has been a tad affected.

We’d also suggest that more thought is required about the basic problem. Britain does not have a shortage of holes in the ground. It is still true that we extract more - gravel, sand and so on - from the Earth than we have waste to put back into such holes. Our only shortage is of holes licensed to take such waste - something fairly easily solved by a few bureaucratic signatures.

Yes, yes, there’s all that about recycling everything and saving precious resources. But all of this is about things that we already all agree aren’t going to be recycled. That they’re valuless is why people are dumping them. The reason people dump them on verges and fields is because we’ve - wholly artificially - made it expensive to put them into appropriately licensed and monitored holes in the ground. Make that last cheaper - kill the landfill tax, beat up local councils into relaxing rules about taking stuff to the dump and so on - and more will be properly landfilled and less littered across the countryside.

Now, of course, there are always those who prefer the stamping of the feet, the crushing of the vehicles and the insistence that the people just must do what they’re damn well told to. But why not work with the grain of human behaviour and make cheap - and so tempt people into - the desired behaviour? Rather than vast expense plus hideous punishment?

After all, all of this is going to go into landfill anyway. Why not make it convenient for the originators to take it there directly?

Tim Worstall