Name: Environment and Climate Change Committee
Uploaded: 2026-11-11T10:01:03+00:00
Duration: 5818 s

00:09 - 02:31

Oratore 2

Good morning and welcome to the Lords Committee on the Environment and Climate Change. Today, we will be hearing from the CEO of the Environment Agency, Philip Duffy, on two subjects, firstly on waste crime, which will be the third follow-up session of the committee's waste crime inquiry, and the second part of the meeting will focus on drought, essentially to understand the situation since the committee's report on drought was published in May this year. Before we start, may I remind everyone that the session will be webcast live on Parliament TV and that a transcript will be taken and made public. Members are reminded that they should declare any relevant interests the first time they speak. I'll take the opportunity here to say that I am a Director of Peers for the Planet, and when we come to the drought report, that I own a borehole on our home in South Oxfordshire.

Today is a little unusual, colleagues, so before we start, may I let everyone know that at 11:00 AM we will stand to observe the 2 minutes silence in remembrance of the Armistice. The Committee's Clerk, Alistair, will give me the signal when it is almost time. So, that's just a heads-up. So, we should start business and the First of all, Philip Duffy, thank you very much for the letter that we received late I think it was yesterday. We have been waiting for it for some time, but it's good that it arrived in time for this meeting.

The first question that I'd like to put to you is to ask you to update the committee on Operation Unite and, in particular, what were the challenges faced and the lessons learned from this campaign? Please introduce the campaign to us.

02:31 - 03:31

Oratore 1

Thank you very much, Chair, and it's great to be back here talking to you about this important subject. Operation Unite, I flagged when I was last in front of the committee as essentially an experiment to see whether we could improve the response across the organisation and with our law enforcement partners, and there were sort of three big things we were trying to achieve. The first one was being genuinely intelligence-driven, so not just waiting till we're looking at a piece of rubbish in a field, but thinking ahead about where do we think criminals are infiltrating the waste system and taking a more proactive, targeted approach to where we put our enforcement activity. The second approach was to look at permits. It is, I think, to my mind, in the minds of many who look at the Environment Agency, peculiar that the agency issues permits to regulate all sorts of activity, but we very rarely revoke them or suspend them, which means that you can, in some cases, breach those permits year after year with no great consequence, and we want to change that.

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