Licensed and legal
Your duty of care, in plain English, and how to check any waste carrier in about a minute.
The rule nobody mentions
If you pay someone to take your waste away, the law puts a duty on you to check they are a registered carrier. Not on them. On you.
So when a van-load of your old kitchen turns up in a lay-by outside Bunwell, the council goes through it, finds an envelope with your address on it, and writes to you. The man you paid forty quid is not part of that conversation.
Why our numbers are not printed on this page
They used to be. We took them off, and it is worth explaining why — because the same reasoning applies to any registration number you find on any website.
A waste carrier registration is a public record, but it is not a password. There is nothing stopping anyone reading a number off a website and quoting it as their own, and that is exactly what happens. Somebody knocks, offers to clear the garage cash in hand, and when you ask whether they are registered they reel off a number without blinking. You look it up. It comes back valid, current, held in the name of a real firm.
The check passed. It proved nothing. The number belonged to someone else, and when your waste appears in a field the trail leads back to the firm whose number was copied — and to you. The two people in the story who did nothing wrong.
So ask us, and you get it. On the phone or in writing, along with the name it is registered in. What we will not do is leave it sitting on a web page for somebody else to use.
How to check anyone properly
The question is not whether the number exists. It is whether the number belongs to the person standing in your drive. Two things:
- Get the number from them, not from a website. Ask directly. Do not accept a photograph of a certificate either — a photo can be of anybody’s.
- Check the name, not just the number. The Environment Agency public register shows the name a registration is held in and whether it is current. If that name is not the firm you are talking to, you have your answer.
It takes about a minute and it costs nothing. And if someone cannot give you a number at all, you have learned something useful even faster.
What you get from us
- Our registration number and the name it is held in, as soon as you ask for it
- A waste transfer note showing what we took and where it went
- A scrap metal dealer licence for the district we are collecting in
- A certificate of destruction on any vehicle, issued by the authorised treatment facility that destroys it
None of that is us going above and beyond. It is the legal minimum. The interesting question is why so few people in this trade can show it to you.