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Digital waste tracking in Scotland and Northern Ireland: who does what from 1 January. The owner, the office, the gate and the driver.

Friday 13 November 2026. Digital waste tracking starts in Scotland and Northern Ireland on 1 January 2027, seven weeks today. The Scottish regulations put the whole duty on one person, “the operator”. A yard is not one person. It is whoever’s name is on the permit, whoever does the office, whoever is on the gate, and a driver backing a lorry in.

So this page is written by person. Find the heading that is you and read that part. If you run the yard, send the others theirs.

Who does what from 1 January 2027 at a yard in Scotland or Northern Ireland, from the Scottish regulations and the regulators’ guidance, read on 13 November 2026.
Who New for you Have ready
The owner The duty is yours. Register the organisation, pay the £26, decide who reports The organisation’s Government Gateway or One Login. The permit or licence
The office Check every load came back with a number. Chase errors. The quarterly return still goes in The Defra sign-in. The January dates
The gate A record of every load, each one Who brought it, their number, the lorry’s reg, what it is, the weight
The driver Nothing to send until phase 2. Three questions at the gate Carrier number. The lorry’s reg. The consignment note, if there is one
Someone scrapping their own car Nothing The log book, as now

One thing first, for Northern Ireland. Scotland’s rules are law and are quoted below. Northern Ireland’s are still not on legislation.gov.uk. We looked again this morning. So every regulation number on this page is Scotland’s. What is settled for Northern Ireland is the month, the service, the £26 and who to ask, which is DAERA. NetRegs, the guidance DAERA writes with SEPA, gives both nations the same list of what to do.

I own the yard. What do I have to do?

Regulation 2 says the operator is “the person authorised by permit under the 2018 Regulations to carry on a waste activity at a permitted facility”. That is the name on the permit. If the permit is in the company’s name, it is the company. Regulation 4(3): “The operator must comply with the steps” for each load. Anybody can do the typing. The duty does not move to whoever is holding the tablet.

If the operator is a company, regulation 16 reaches past it. Where an offence is “attributable to any neglect on the part of” a director, manager or secretary, “the individual as well as the body corporate” commits it. So hand the job to someone, and then look now and again to see that it is being done.

Four jobs are yours and nobody else’s.

  1. Check you are in. In Scotland, SEPA says phase 1 is for sites that “operate under permit level” and names scrap yards. A site at registration level is not in phase 1. In Northern Ireland, GOV.UK says “all organisations that are licensed or permitted to receive waste”.
  2. Register the organisation. GOV.UK: “You must not use a personal Government Gateway account for this service”. It wants the organisation’s Government Gateway or GOV.UK One Login. Find out this week who holds that login. Then copy the API code off the screen. Your software needs it.
  3. Put the £26 in the diary. GOV.UK: “The first payment is due by 31 January 2027.” It is per organisation and covers every site the organisation has.
  4. Decide who reports, and how. Through software, or on Defra’s own spreadsheet, which NetRegs calls “a temporary solution”. Then tell the gate and the office, by name, which of them it is.

If you are a sole trader who cannot use a computer at all, Scotland has a route for you, and it is narrow. It is in our Scotland piece.

And if you have wondered why a Scottish duty is met on a service Defra runs: an Order made on Wednesday and laid before both Parliaments today “paves the way for the Scottish Ministers and a Minister of the Crown to enter into agency arrangements” for exactly that. It comes into force on 1 January. It asks nothing of you.

I do the office. What changes for me?

Less than you have been told. The return you already send each quarter still goes in: to SEPA by 28 January for October to December, to NIEA by 31 January, which is a Sunday. We went through what stays, paper by paper, for Scotland and for Northern Ireland.

What is new for you is a check. Regulation 4(4) has two steps, not one. Record the information, and “check that the specified information in the digital waste record has been entered into the digital waste tracking system”. Regulation 4(5) says the check is met when the operator “receives the digital waste record number”. So that is the job. Every load gets a number back. A load with no number is not finished, whatever the gate says.

The same paragraph says the check is not met if the number never came because the fee was unpaid, or because a message came back “indicating an error” and nobody chose to “investigate and correct” it. An error message is a job, and it is yours.

Three more things worth having on the wall.

I work the gate. What do I have to write down?

The same things for every load. Schedule 1 has the full list and SEPA has it in plain words. NetRegs sends Northern Ireland yards to SEPA’s list too. At a gate it comes to six questions.

  1. When did it arrive? “The date and time the controlled waste was received”. When it came through the gate, not when you got round to it.
  2. Who brought it? Their name, and their carrier number. If they have no number, “the reason why”. SEPA’s own example is a householder.
  3. What did it come on? “The vehicle registration number for each vehicle used.” That is the lorry’s reg, not the scrap car’s.
  4. What is it? A description and the waste code. SEPA says the asterisk on a hazardous code “does not need to be included in your digital records”.
  5. How much? The weight, and “if the weight is estimated or actual”. No weighbridge is fine. An estimate is allowed as long as it says it is one.
  6. Is it hazardous? Then “the code for the consignment note that travelled with the waste or if there is no consignment note, the reason why”. A car that has not been depolluted is hazardous.

There is more on the list: the containers, the physical form, the hazard codes, how the waste will be treated. For a scrap car those answers barely change from one car to the next, and software should fill them in for you.

How long you have: in Scotland, “the end of the second working day after the day on which the load of controlled waste is received”. The day it arrives does not count, and neither does a weekend. In Northern Ireland nobody has published the deadline. Do each load the day it comes in and no deadline can catch you in either.

Nobody is asking you to learn the regulations. They are asking you for the lorry’s reg.

I deliver cars to a yard. Do I have to do anything?

Not yet. January is phase 1, and phase 1 is for the sites that receive waste. NetRegs puts “collectors, carriers, brokers, dealers” in phase 2: “Phase 2 public beta is expected in April 2027 becoming mandatory in October 2027”. SEPA says the phase 2 regulations are still “under development”. So you send nothing to anybody in January.

But from 1 January the yard cannot finish its record without three things from you.

If a broker arranged the job, the yard needs the broker’s name and number as well. Keep your certificate in the cab. The gate is not being awkward. It has a box to fill and you are the only one who knows the answer.

The notes you carry now do not change. NetRegs: “Digital Waste Tracking does not replace existing waste duty of care requirements.”

I am scrapping my own car. Does this change anything for me?

No. The duty is on the yard that takes it. You register nothing, pay nothing and send nothing. The yard writes down that a householder brought the car, which is SEPA’s own example of a load with no carrier number. Your side is what GOV.UK already says: give the yard the log book, keep the yellow section, and tell DVLA.

What BreakerHQ does for each of them

The owner signs up, picks Scotland or Northern Ireland, and types the permit number and the Defra code once in Settings. Then adds each person under Members, each with their own sign-in and a role. There is nothing to install. It runs on the phone or tablet you already have.

The gate role books in, weighs, takes photos, logs depollution and sends to Defra. It cannot change the settings. The gate screen covers the six questions above and fills in the parts that are the same for every car. It works with no signal and sends when the signal comes back.

The office, as an admin, sees on each car whether Defra has accepted it. If a receipt fails, an email goes out with the car and the reason, to the owner or to whichever addresses you choose. Correcting a receipt Defra already holds is for an owner or an admin, not the gate. Each quarter the Vehicles tab builds the rows for the SEPA or NIEA return.

A viewer can look and change nothing, for anyone who only needs to see the records.

The driver signs in to nothing. The gate asks for the number, or the reason there is not one.

Three honest gaps. We hold no copy of SEPA’s or Northern Ireland’s carrier register, so a carrier’s number is recorded as given and not checked. The due date we show on a Scottish receipt counts weekends but not Scottish bank holidays, so around New Year it is early. It is never late. And we show no deadline for each load in Northern Ireland, because nobody has published one.

Sign in and start

The regulations name one person. It takes about four to keep them. Send each of yours the part with their name on it.

Sources