News is further blow to organisation under fire after its chairman was discovered to be holidaying during recent floods
The Environment Agency has failed to meet its target for shutting down illegal waste dumps that cause heavy pollution and are often run by criminal gangs.
The news is a further blow to an organisation that has been under fire because its chairman, Sir Philip Dilley, was discovered to be holidaying in Barbados during the recent floods, instead of leading the response in the UK to the storms.
The Environment Agency was supposed to reduce the number of high-risk illegal waste sites from 272 in 2014-15 to 206 in 2015-16. But, by summer, the number of these dumps had increased to 300, which earned the organisation its lowest performance measure, a “red” status.
