Means of transport is Road but there is no vehicle registration
When the means of transport is Road, DEFRA wants the registration of the vehicle that carried the waste. The receipt said Road and left the registration out.
The message DEFRA sends
If carrier.meansOfTransport is "Road" then carrier.vehicleRegistration is required
The usual cause
- The vehicle registration was left out of the receipt altogether. (An empty value gets a different DEFRA message: it says the field is not allowed to be empty.)
- The means of transport was left on Road, and the load went another way.
How to fix it
- Add the registration of the vehicle that delivered the load.
- If the load did not travel by road, change the means of transport to the one that applies, and send no registration.
Fix the value in your software or spreadsheet, then send the receipt again.
The means of transport the validator accepts
- Road
- Rail
- Air
- Sea
- Inland Waterway
- Piped
- Other
Sources
- DEFRA waste-movement-utils on GitHub: the shared validator code that DEFRA's receipt services pin, published under the Open Government Licence
- DEFRA waste-tracking-service on GitHub: the Receipt API specification
The message wording and the formats listed come from DEFRA's validator code, version 1.18.0, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The causes and fixes are our reading of its rules.
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Start on the free plan
CarrierNote is on the GOV.UK software provider list, connected to DEFRA's Digital Waste Tracking service. Receiving sites are in scope from October 2026 and carriers from October 2027, and you can be recording to DEFRA's standard from your first load, whenever you start.