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Wales: it is 1 October for you too, and the link is Defra's

A yard in the Valleys rang us this week and said the deadline was 1 October. We said it was not, Wales was later. He said it was. He was right, and we were the ones who had read the regulation. That is worth a piece on its own, because if we can get it wrong on the phone, the trade in Wales is being told all sorts, and a yard in Hirwaun or Holyhead has eight days to sort out which bits are true.

One law, made in Cardiff

Wales did not borrow England’s rules. It made its own. The Digital Waste Tracking (Wales) Regulations 2026 were laid before the Senedd on 3 March and agreed that month, and regulation 1(2) is one sentence: "These Regulations come into force on 1 October 2026." GOV.WALES says it plainer still: "Operators of waste receiving sites must use the Digital Waste Tracking System from 1 October 2026."

So the date is the same as England, and it is your own government’s date, not Westminster’s. Northern Ireland and Scotland are the ones with three more months, and that is where the rumour came from. Somebody heard "the devolved nations start in January" and took Wales along for the ride.

The same deadline, one paragraph over

Regulation 4(9) of the Welsh regulations: the operator "must take all reasonable steps to ensure completion of the specified steps by the end of the second working day after the day on which the load of controlled waste or hazardous controlled waste is received by the operator." A car in on Monday is due by the end of Wednesday. The day it arrives does not count. England’s version is regulation 4(8) and says the same thing, so if you have read our other pieces, the number on the door has changed and the room behind it has not.

Regulation 5: "The digital waste tracking system fee is £26." Regulation 6 is the outage rule, and it has one Welsh word in it that matters: when the system is down for reasons outside your control you "notify Natural Resources Wales of the outage as soon as reasonably practicable", unless Defra has already sent you an outage notification. Then a written record within the same two working days, and the entry within seven days of the line coming back. NRW takes the call, not the Environment Agency.

The link is Defra’s, and that is not a mistake

This is the one that stops Welsh yards at the first screen. The law is Welsh, the regulator is Welsh, and the button says Defra. It looks like you have been sent to the wrong country.

You have not. The Welsh Government’s own written statement, 3 March 2026: "The DWTS will be UK-wide, with each nation making its own but closely aligned regulations." Four sets of rules, one system, and Defra runs the system for all four. The Environment Agency said the same when it went live in April: "All affected organisations will be legally required to use the service from October 2026 in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland and from January 2027 in Scotland." GOV.WALES does not offer a Welsh registration page because there is not one. It sends you to the GOV.UK guidance, and the Welsh-language version of that guidance has a start button that goes to waste-tracking.defra.gov.uk.

That is the link. Answer no to the local authority question, register your organisation and your site, and the service gives you an API code. The code goes into whichever software you use. Ours has a box for it in Settings.

What is Welsh and what is not

Your permit number

The second place Welsh yards get stuck. Defra’s API specification lists the permit formats it accepts, nation by nation, and for "Wales (NRW)" it lists two: XX9999XX and EPR/XX9999XX, where X is a letter and 9 is a digit. That is the 8-character EPR number on your NRW permit. Type it in as it is, capitals, no spaces, nothing in front of it. NRW says the same thing about its own returns form: report your 8 digit EPR permit number, and it will not accept an EAWML or other reference. If you have an old licence number from before NRW existed, it is the EPR number Defra wants, and it is on the permit.

Your carriers

Waste carriers in Wales register with NRW, and NRW keeps its own public register of carriers, brokers and dealers. The Environment Agency register covers England. Software that checks a carrier number against the EA register, ours included, will not find a Welsh CBDU number there, and until this week our gate said "Scottish and NI carriers will not show" and forgot to mention Wales. A Welsh yard read that as "your code is wrong". It now says a Welsh, Scottish or NI carrier is registered elsewhere and that the number is not at fault. It never blocked a booking, but it should have said so in Welsh terms from the start, and that one is on us.

The spreadsheet does not go away

Every permitted site in Wales already sends NRW a waste return four times a year: what came in and what went out, by waste code, in tonnes, on NRW’s spreadsheet, to waste.returns@cyfoethnaturiolcymru.gov.uk by the end of the month after the quarter. NRW’s letter to permit holders last December was blunt about lateness: "Late waste returns are recorded as a permit breach and therefore attract a compliance score." That return is a condition of your permit and digital waste tracking does not replace it. What starts on 1 October is the receipt side, every load in, reported within two working days. Reporting what leaves the yard digitally is a later phase, and the Welsh Government’s statement says so: "A second phase, planned for delivery through future regulations, will see the digital tracking of waste received at HWRCs and waste movements from sites where the waste is produced through to waste receiving sites."

What BreakerHQ does for a Welsh yard

The same thing it does for an English one. A vehicle at the gate becomes a legal receipt in one tap, stored on the tablet that second and filed to Defra the moment there is signal, and the deadline guard emails you if a receipt fails. The permit number goes in Settings as it appears on your NRW permit, and the Register with Defra button in Settings is the link above. Two honest gaps. Our screens are in English. And a couple of them still quote England’s paragraph numbers where yours differ by one, which we are fixing. Neither changes what Defra receives.

If you need help from the regulator, it is NRW, not Defra’s helpdesk: wastetracking@cyfoethnaturiolcymru.gov.uk. Correspondence welcomed in Welsh and English, as their letters say.

Set up your yard now

The yard in the Valleys was right about the date. He is right about most of it, as it turns out. The only thing he had wrong was the link, and now he has that too.