It’s probably a decade while since I’ve spent any time in a car scrapyard, but that changed earlier this week with a trip to West Sussex. It was for a feature I was writing on proposed changes to the vehicle recycling regulations. At the moment an average of 85 per cent of every car by weight has to be re-used, but in a few years that’s going up to 95 per cent.

The days of piling cars up on top of each other with no one quite sure what to do with next – as in the picture – have long gone. Every vehicle is ‘depolluted’, which means it’s systematically drained of all fluids, then crushed into a cube about a metre square. It’s then put inside a large machine and pounded with industrial hammers until it all falls apart. The loose bits of metal and plastic are mechanically sorted and sent off to various firms to be turned into a thousand different things.

And during the recent Scrappage Scheme, that's exactly what happened to thousands of perfectly good traded-in cars that were running well and had a good few years of life left in them yet. Why? Because that was what the Government said had to happen. Trade-ins usually go to auction where they're bought by car dealers specialising in the cheaper end of the market. The guys at this scrapyard said the number of decent VW Golfs they had to crush would have made you cry. But under the Scheme they had to be destroyed or broken up for parts. The result is there’s now a big hole in the used car market. Good quality 10 year old cars, much loved by people who can’t afford a newer car, are genuinely harder to find.