Waste carrier reform: registration becomes a permit

What is in force today

Registration, upper tier and lower tier, exactly as the checker describes. Nothing on this page has changed the fees, the tiers or the duty to register. Treat everything below as planned, not current.

What Defra has announced

Defra's policy paper Reforming the waste carrier, broker and dealer system, published 22 August 2025 and applying to England, sets out plans to change "from a registration to a permit-based system", introduce "enhanced background checks", and introduce "a technical competence requirement" (gov.uk).

• New words. Carriers, brokers and dealers become waste transporters and waste controllers, with a combined controller-transporter category for skip companies, waste collection companies and waste sites.
• Three permit types under standard rules environmental permits, tiered by scale and by the type and volume of waste, across four levels of risk.
• Registered exemptions for lower-risk activity, re-registered every 3 years. Farmers transporting their own agricultural waste, and extractive waste from mines and quarries, are named as exemption cases.
• Technical competence for the permit holder and nominated persons, by individual assessment or a workplace route, with an anticipated model similar to the CIWM (WAMITAB) system used for site permits.
• Three-year permits paid up front as an application fee plus a subsistence element, with chargeable renewals every 3 years.

When

The policy paper does not publish a go-live date. It describes the transition instead: once the new system is live, holders of an upper tier registration apply for the relevant permit when their registration falls due for renewal, which staggers the change over 3 years; holders of a lower tier registration, which never expires, must apply for a permit or register an exemption within 12 months of go-live, after which the lower tier registration ceases to exist; and new applicants go straight to the new system. Charges will be set out in an impact assessment published alongside the legislation, and the Environment Agency will consult separately on standard rules and charges.

The change that is dated: digital waste tracking

Mandatory digital waste tracking is on a published timeline. The service is in public beta, and Defra's policy paper states it becomes mandatory for receiving site operators from October 2026 in England and Wales and January 2027 in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Phase 2, the part built for waste collectors, that is carriers, brokers and dealers, is stated as mandatory from October 2027 (gov.uk, last updated 5 August 2026).

Defra's paper puts the current population at roughly 300,000 registered waste carriers, brokers and dealers, 150,000 registered waste exemption holders and 12,000 waste site operators. That is the scale of the change, and it is why the transition is staggered rather than switched.