How to check a waste carrier licence.

A business that carries waste in the course of its work, buys or sells it, or arranges for others to move it, must be registered as a waste carrier, broker or dealer. That covers skip hire firms, clearance and man-and-van services, scrap collectors, builders taking away their own rubble, and firms that broker waste contracts without ever driving a lorry. What most people call a waste carrier licence is this registration.

Each nation of the UK keeps its own register: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have an environmental regulator with a public search. A carrier registers where its business is based, so search the register of that nation first.

Search the web for "check waste carrier registration" and choose the regulator's own service for the nation the business is in rather than a paid lookup site. None of them charges or asks for an account.

You can search by the business name, by its registration number or by a postcode. A trading name will often find nothing: if the name on the van does not work, try the registered company name, or the postcode of the yard.

In England and Wales a registration is either upper tier or lower tier. Lower tier is for businesses that only carry waste they produce themselves, other than building and demolition waste, and for a few others such as charities. Upper tier is for everyone else, including anyone carrying other people's waste and anyone carrying their own building waste.

An upper tier registration lasts three years and then has to be renewed; a lower tier registration does not expire. If a skip or clearance firm shows you a lower tier registration, it is not registered to take your waste away. Scotland and Northern Ireland use their own categories and renewal periods, which their registers show.

In England an upper tier registration number begins CBDU and a lower tier one CBDL, followed by digits. The number belongs on the carrier's quotes, invoices and waste paperwork, and you can ask for it before you hand anything over. Searching by it finds exactly one registration.

The record shows the business name and address, the tier, whether it is registered as a carrier, a broker or a dealer, and when an upper tier registration expires. A registration in another name than the one you were given is a question to ask before the first collection.

A business must take reasonable steps to make sure its waste goes to someone allowed to take it, and keep a waste transfer note for each load, or one note covering regular collections, for at least two years. Checking the registration before the first collection is the simplest of those steps, and the one an inspector asks about first.

Householders have a duty of care too. Rubbish handed to an unregistered clearance firm and later found fly-tipped can be traced back, and the householder can be fined as well as the firm.

A registration says a business may carry waste. It does not say where the waste goes: the site that receives it needs a permit of its own, which is a different register and a different check. Ask where your waste will be taken, and check that site too.

New sites are applied for long before they open. A business applying to run a waste, recycling or treatment site, or to change one, is consulted on in public before its permit is issued, and that is when it is choosing its weighbridge, drainage, fire systems and treatment plant.

CapexRadar counts those applications by region on its waste and water page and names the companies a month later. Stanfell sends them to suppliers each weekday morning as they come in, with the figures, the company behind them and who to call.