Environmental offences

Environmental offences in the UK

Environmental crime is concisely described in Parliamentary Briefing Paper POSTNote no. 547: Environmental Crime (Jan 2017) as ‘any illegal activity that harms the environment’. The Briefing adds that it ‘...can also have serious health and social impacts’. Environmental offences are regulatory and now, exclusively, statutory response to environmental crime. Yet, there has been concern over many years about the effectiveness of environmental crime enforcement and whether the UK criminal justice system adequately protects the environment. The Environmental Protection Act 1990 was introduced to assist, although a number of parliamentary committee inquiries, NGO reports, and public funded research over the last 25 years have found that fundamental problems of enforcement persist. In 2015, the EU project, EFFACE, published: Fighting Environmental Crime in the UK: A Country Report, concluding at pages 75–81 that the existing legal regimes for environmental crimes in the UK were far too complex and fragmented. It added:

‘This creates difficulties in complying with the system, even when there is willingness to comply. There are also too many Agencies involved and, although there is a very good degree of coordination among them,

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