According to BBC Breakfast this morning, the UK Environment Agency has been criticised for a failure to act on massive illegals waste dumps.

You might not be expecting me to write this but, in Scotland, the dumping looks to be just as bad with Sepa reporting 58 dumps assessed as high-risk (posing significant environmental threats, typically larger-scale operations)¹.

The differences are in performance.

In 2024/25, Sepa intervened and closed 167 sites.²

Ten times the population, the EA ten times bigger, the task ten times bigger as we saw above, so around 1 670 interventions?

Nope, 743³, less than half as many per head of population.

How is this possible? After 15 years of Tory/Labour mismanagement, the EA is rubbish at doing its job?

Sources:

1. https://beta.sepa.scot/about-sepa/who-we-are/our-performance/annual-report-and-accounts-2023-2024
2. https://beta.sepa.scot/about-sepa/who-we-are/our-performance/annual-report-and-accounts-2024-2025
3. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/environment-agency-annual-report-and-accounts-2024-to-2025