Offences, penalties and a public register: Part 5 in ten minutes
Part 5 of the regulations is the part nobody reads until they have to. It is titled Offences and Civil Sanctions, and it is worth ten minutes now rather than a solicitor later.
What is actually an offence
Regulation 16 makes it an offence for an operator to fail the reporting duty itself, the specified steps within the deadline. The less obvious ones: failing to make the written record during a system outage, failing to keep and produce those outage records, failing to correct an error within the correction deadline, and failing to comply with a compliance notice. The pattern is worth noticing. The offences are about record-keeping discipline, not about the waste itself, so a tidy yard with a sloppy process is more exposed than it thinks.
Civil sanctions and the public register
Alongside criminal offences, Part 5 gives the regulator civil tools: monetary penalties, compliance notices and enforcement cost recovery notices. And regulation 23 creates a register of enforcement action, which is public. Enforcement under these rules is not a quiet letter, it is a searchable record with your site's name on it, visible to insurers, customers and competitors.
The practical read
Every offence in the list is avoided by the same habit: make the record when the vehicle arrives, let it submit itself, and correct mistakes as new records when you find them. The regulations reward exactly the discipline that good software makes automatic, which is not a coincidence. Defra designed the duty around records arriving through software.