Who is allowed to take your things away

The rule, in one sentence

If someone takes waste away from your home and they are doing it as a business, they must be registered with the Environment Agency, and you have a legal duty to check.

Both halves of that matter. The first is their obligation and the second is yours, and the second is the one almost nobody knows about.

What a registration actually permits

Here is where most advice stops too early. “Are they registered?” is the wrong question, or rather it is only half of one. There are two tiers of registration and they permit very different things.

Upper tier is what a clearance firm, a man-and-van service or a skip hire company needs. It permits carrying waste that somebody else produced. It costs £191.02, it has to be renewed every three years for £130.25, and the registration number begins CBDU.

Lower tier is for a business carrying only waste it produced itself, and for charities and voluntary organisations. It is free, it never expires, and its numbers begin CBDL. A joiner taking their own offcuts to the tip is lower tier. So is a charity shop moving donated goods between branches.

The Environment Agency puts the limit plainly: a lower tier carrier may not offer a waste management service to others. Construction and demolition waste is upper tier even when it is your own.

Now the figure that makes this worth knowing. When we read the register on 3 August 2026 it held 417,115 current registrations, and 271,540 of them, just over 65%, were lower tier. Nearly two in three registrations on the public register do not permit the holder to take your rubbish away.

That is not a claim that two thirds of clearance firms are operating unlawfully. Most of those registrations belong to businesses that have no interest in your loft: builders, landscapers, plumbers, garages, farms. The point is narrower and more useful. If you search a name, see the word “registered” and stop there, you have not actually checked anything. You have to look at the tier.

How to check

Ask for the registration number before the work starts. Every registered carrier has one, and they are required to give it to you.

Then look it up, either on our free checker or on the Environment Agency’s own register. Both read the same data. Three things are worth a moment:

• The tier. CBDU for anyone taking your waste. CBDL is a business carrying its own.
• The expiry date. Upper tier registrations run for three years, and of the 145,575 current upper tier registrations we hold, 8,774 expire within the next 90 days. That is about one in seventeen. A registration that lapses the week before your booking is no use to you.
• The name. Firms often register under a legal entity name rather than the name on the van. A mismatch is common and usually innocent, but it is worth resolving before the work rather than after.

If nothing comes up, that is not proof of anything. A spelling variant is enough to cause it, and a new registration can take a few days to appear. Search the number rather than the name, because the number is the only field that is unique.

What happens if you get it wrong

Your duty is set out in section 34(2A) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990:

It shall be the duty of the occupier of any domestic property in England or Wales to take all such measures available to him as are reasonable in the circumstances to secure that any transfer by him of household waste produced on the property is only to an authorised person or to a person for authorised transport purposes.

“Authorised person” is defined in the same section and includes your council’s waste collection service, a permit holder, and a registered carrier.

If your waste is fly-tipped and traced back to you, a council can issue a fixed penalty notice. Defra’s guidance to councils sets the default at £200, with a permitted range of £150 to £600, reduced to as little as £120 if paid within ten days of the notice. That is a civil penalty rather than a prosecution, and it can be issued even though somebody else did the dumping.

The test councils are told to apply is worth quoting, because it is the whole reason this page exists. If fly-tipped waste is traced to a household and the occupier cannot say who took it, or names a carrier who turns out to be unauthorised, it is reasonable for the council to conclude the duty was not met.

So the fine is not really for the fly-tipping. It is for not checking.

What to ask for

You are not required to keep any paperwork. Defra’s guidance is explicit that there is no duty on an individual to keep a waste transfer note. But the guidance also describes what a household would show to demonstrate it did check, and that list is short enough to be worth doing anyway:

• The business name, and the vehicle it arrived in
• The registration number, and a note of when you checked it
• What was taken, and roughly when

A photograph of the van with its number plate, and a note of the CBDU number with the date, takes under a minute. If the waste is later found in a lay-by, that minute is the difference between a conversation and a £600 penalty.

One last thing. This all applies to England. Scotland is regulated by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Wales by Natural Resources Wales, each with its own separate register, and a firm registered there will not appear on the one we publish.