The problems caused by cars on the congested roads of Britain are well-known. It seems that they are increasingly troublesome when they come to the end of their lives too. Disposing of them is not the relatively-easy job it once was, when you rang a vehicle dismantler and he came and towed your MoT failure away after slipping a few pounds into your hand.

New legislation, rightly introduced to protect the environment, is making dismantling a costly business. All oil, petrol and batteries must be taken out of cars before they are crushed. They must be dismantled on an impermeable surface to avoid contaminating the ground.

Even though the value of scrap metal is currently high, motorists can no longer expect to be paid for their worn-out vehicles. It is they who must do the paying if dismantlers are to bring their practices up to the new legal standards - which threequarters of the 28 Bradford scrapyards subjected to a spot check were found to have failed to do.

The action taken against them will no doubt lead to many of them mending their ways and putting up their charges to meet the increased costs. And that, in turn, could tempt motorists to dump their vehicles in the street or arrange to have them "stolen" to be burned out in a wood somewhere.

The Environment Agency is rightly determined to clamp down on this. It needs the public to help it by reporting people who illegally dispose of cars if measures to tackle one environmental problem are not to create another, even worse one.