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Landfill tax rises boosting fly-tipping, says spending watchdog
National Audit Office says tax has increased amount of money criminals can make from waste crime

A problem with the use of government to do things is that it takes the auditor twenty years to work out the effect of a policy.

11 thoughts on “Err, yes?”

  1. Similarly, constant tax rises on cigarettes in Australia have taken the black market over the last twenty years from ‘chop chop’ which you had to meet someone in a car park to buy (appalling stuff) to my local bottle shop selling cheap ish imported, not too bad, manufactured smokes.

    You used to have to get someone to vouch for you, be alone in the shop, all that, but now they don’t care anymore. Still cash though, of course.

  2. My county pretty much eliminated fly tipping by including the fees in the property tax. The local landfill was free at the point of use. You only got an occasional load dumped when it was closed for a holiday.

  3. A nearby council has restricted what can be thrown away at the local refuse depot. They’ve now put a charge of a few quid on even a single bag of “builder’s rubble”. And fly tipping is a problem in the area. I wonder why.

  4. Correction. It’s not the council, it’s the private company that runs it on behalf of the council.

  5. SBML

    I think it might indeed be the council, or rather they charge the contractor who passes it into the customer. My local tip is very apologetic about charging.

    When I lived in Munich, the bottle banks had warnings that use of those facilities after 7pm or 1pm on Saturdays and at all on Sundays or bank holidays wiuld incur a 500 DM fine. The bins were empty and the space around was littered with thousands of bottles.

  6. Its not an EU levy , 4 MS do not have a levy. Most do. The EU Landfill directive requires cost recovery. The UK one, predating the directive was orginally set up to be revenue neutral and then HMT doubled iirc on an non consulted budget announcement

  7. OK “EU imposed” is a bit unfair. It was the EU Directive in 1999 that set criteria for disposing waste that caused costs to rise, which the government passes onto the disposer.
    That idiot Gummer introduced the tax in 1996 in anticipation of the directive. In typical HMRC and civil service practice they have gold plated the whole process and it has risen from £7 in 1996 to £98 per ton now.

  8. use of government to do things is that it takes the auditor twenty years to work out the effect of a policy. …
    The mob has been in the waste disposal business for over a century. You’d think government could take less than that amount of time to clean up the industry, and by extension the environment.
    But no.

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