What is organised crime doing disposing of rubbish?

There were headlines recently about how more than half of local councils had recorded a large increase in the number of ‘fly-tipping’ incidents: cases where rubbish and waste are collected, then illegally dumped and left to rot in open fields. That practice normally has dire consequences for the local environment, and sometimes for the health of animals and people who live close by. Various sources were quoted claiming that organised criminal gangs were usually responsible for illegal fly-tipping. On the face of it, that is an astonishing claim. What is organised crime doing disposing of rubbish? But no one seems interested in finding out what lies beneath it.

When I worked at the Home Office, I was amazed to discover the existence of this criminal underworld — and government’s unintentional complicity in it. Some of the worst fly-tipping is committed by waste management companies working under contract for local councils. Dig deeper, and many of these companies turn out to have been run by organised criminal gangs. They appear to be effective and respectable, and offer astonishingly low bids for disposing of the council’s rubbish. Their bids are irresistibly low because they skip the most important part of the contract: detoxifying the rubbish. They just dump it instead.

It isn’t only councils that have handed contracts worth large sums of public money to organised criminals offering suspiciously cheap rates. The police themselves have done so as well: one force I’ve spoken to discovered that it had awarded its own waste-disposal contract to a company affiliated to an organised criminal network.

Behind the increase in fly-tipping is a frightening development: the infiltration of public sector procurement by organised crime. It is happening on a very significant scale. ‘Waste management’ is just the start — as it was in Italy in the 1950s for the Mafia.