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The first late receipt. Thursday’s loads went late at midnight, Friday’s are due tonight, and the code is on the screen the moment you register.

It is Tuesday 6 October 2026, and at one minute past midnight the first receipt in England went late. Not many of them, and nobody rang. A car that came in on Thursday, the first day of the duty, had until the end of Monday to be on Defra’s system, and if it is not there now it is not going to be on time. Nothing happened at midnight. That is what late looks like: a date on a record that is later than another date.

Why Thursday’s loads and not Friday’s

Regulation 4(8): "the deadline for completing the specified steps is 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, and the regulations define a working day as a day that is not "a Saturday or a Sunday", not "Christmas Day", not "Good Friday" and not "a bank holiday in England". So Thursday’s loads had Friday and Monday, and were due by the end of Monday. Friday’s had Monday and Tuesday, and are due tonight. So are Saturday’s and Sunday’s, because the weekend did not count and Monday was their first working day.

What the regulations say about late

Nothing kind, and nothing cruel. There is no sentence that forgives a late entry and no sentence that says a late entry is pointless. The one month people quote is regulation 7(2), and it is for correcting an error "in any event, within one month of the date on which the operator of a permitted facility becomes aware of the error". It is about a record that exists and is wrong, not a record that was never made.

The other sentence people reach for is the outage one. Regulation 6 defines an outage as "circumstances caused by factors beyond the operator of the permitted facility’s control that prevent the entry of the specified information". Not having registered is not beyond your control. The outage steps are for the day the system is down, not for the week you did not get round to it.

What the regulations do have is Part 5: offences, penalties, civil sanctions, and a register of enforcement action that is public. We do not quote the amounts and you should not read them as a tariff. A receipt entered a day late is a record with an honest date on it. A receipt never entered is a gap, and the gap is what the register is for.

The code is in the portal, now

On 28 September we wrote that the approval was not instant and that a yard registering on Thursday morning would not be reporting on Thursday morning. That was true when we stood in that yard, and it is not true this morning, so we are saying so. Register your organisation at waste-tracking.defra.gov.uk and the API code is on the screen the moment it is done. GOV.UK still puts it plainly: "Once you have registered your organisation, you will be given a unique API code. Give this code to your software provider who will apply it to your waste movements."

Three things from the same page that save a second attempt. "You must not use a personal Government Gateway account for this service", so it is the company’s login. You can "use the same API code to send waste movements for every site your organisation operates", so an ATF with a scrap desk needs one code, not two. And the £26 a year is not due until 31 January 2027, so the money is not the reason to wait either. The code is five groups of letters and numbers. Copy it from the screen, because a code typed with four groups looks right and bounces every receipt.

What BreakerHQ does, and does not do

Paste the code into Settings once and every site under that organisation reports with it. Each load you book in gets its Report to Defra under the form, ringed, the moment the record lands, and a load with no signal waits in the device’s own queue and sends when it has one. Thursday’s loads are already in your Recent list with the date they arrived on. Report them today and the record carries that date and the date it was sent, which is the honest version of late.

Two things it cannot do. It cannot register your organisation or fetch your code, because that is your company’s Government Gateway and the one step only you can take. And it cannot make a receipt sent on Tuesday count as sent on Monday. Nothing can. It can only make sure Wednesday’s do not join it.

Open the yard

Nothing happened at midnight, and nobody rang. The date on the record is the only thing that moved, and the code to stop it moving again is on a screen you can open before the kettle has boiled.