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Thursday needs one thing from you: the receipt, inside two working days

Thursday morning, a Corsa on a trailer, and the same lad on the gate as Wednesday. Everything he does with that car he did with Wednesday’s. One thing is added. By the end of Monday, the fact that it arrived is on Defra’s system. That is the whole of 1 October. There is a lot of noise about it, and there is one duty inside the noise.

The duty, in the regulation’s words

Regulation 4 of the Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026 opens with who it is for: "This regulation applies when the operator of a permitted facility receives controlled waste". A breaker with a permit is that operator, and a car coming in is that waste. Then the clock: "the end of the second working day after the day on which the load of controlled waste or hazardous controlled waste is received". The day it arrives does not count. A car in on Monday is due by the end of Wednesday. A car in on Thursday is due by the end of Monday, because the regulation says a working day is not "a Saturday or a Sunday", not Christmas Day, not Good Friday, and not a bank holiday.

It does not say the car must be drained first. It does not say the certificate must be done first. It says received. The receipt goes in as the car came in, hazardous, with the weight, the carrier and the supplier. Defra’s own guidance page works the same example: a load in on Monday morning is due by the end of Wednesday.

Do not stop doing anything else

The receipt is added. Nothing is swapped out. The Certificate of Destruction is still issued on DVLA’s service, and the digital receipt has nothing to do with it. A Cat B from the auction still arrives on a consignment note, and you still keep it. The shell still leaves on the merchant’s transfer note, and the merchant reports that receipt, not you, until the carrier phase arrives in October 2027. The quarterly consignee return still goes to the Environment Agency. The site register your permit requires is still yours to keep. If a piece of paper mattered on Wednesday, it matters on Thursday.

What 1 October adds and what it leaves exactly where it was, from the Digital Waste Tracking Regulations, the ELV Regulations, the Hazardous Waste Regulations and the permit’s appropriate measures
The thing From Thursday
The receipt of each vehicle, entered on Defra’s system New. Due by the end of the second working day after the day it arrived.
The Certificate of Destruction As now. Issued on DVLA’s service when you accept the car for destruction.
The consignment note that comes in with a hazardous vehicle As now. Keep it. Its code goes on the receipt.
The transfer note when the shell leaves As now. The merchant reports that receipt, not you, until the carrier phase in October 2027.
The quarterly consignee return to the Environment Agency As now. The digital receipt does not replace it.
The site register your permit requires As now. Arrival, treatment and despatch, kept and readily accessible.

The code, and why today

You cannot enter a receipt without an API code, and you cannot get the code on Thursday morning. GOV.UK: "The first time you use the service, you will be asked to create a Defra account", and "Once you have registered your organisation, you will be given a unique API code. Give this code to your software provider." Register here, with your company’s Government Gateway account and not your personal one: waste-tracking.defra.gov.uk.

Two things we learned standing in a yard this week, so you do not have to. The code is not emailed. You get a confirmation email, and the code itself sits in your Defra account once the registration is approved, so sign back in and copy it from the screen. And it is five groups of letters and numbers, so copy it, do not type it. A yard that types four groups has a code that looks right and bounces every receipt.

The approval is not instant. It is a registration, and it is checked. A yard that registers on Thursday morning is not reporting on Thursday morning, and the clock on Thursday’s cars does not wait for the post. Register today. It costs £26 a year, and GOV.UK says the first payment is due by 31 January 2027, so the money is not the reason to wait either.

What BreakerHQ does with it

Paste the code once in Settings. From then on the receipt is built at the gate from the reg, the weight and the carrier, and reported to Defra with one tap, inside the two working days, with the arrival time it actually arrived. If a car is booked in late, you tell it the real arrival and the deadline counts from that, not from the day someone found the tablet. If the code is missing or wrong, the gate says so, and booking in still works while you fix it.

Two honest limits. We cannot register you with Defra or fetch your code. That is your company’s account and your Government Gateway, and it is the one thing on this page only you can do. And we do not touch anything in the table above that is marked as now. The certificate, the notes, the return and the register carry on as they did, and we record them beside the receipt rather than replace them.

Set up your yard now

The Corsa on the trailer does not know what day it is. By the end of Monday, Defra will.

Sources