Environment Agency publishes guidance on assessing compliance in move to performance-based regulation of Environmental Permitting regime

On 14 January 2019, the Environment Agency published streamlined and simplified guidance on how it assesses and scores compliance with environmental permits and what happens during and after a compliance assessment. The guidance applies to environmental permitting (EP) for waste operations, installations and non-nuclear radioactive substances. The government also published its response to its September 2018 consultation on changes to how it will assess and score permit compliance.

In the short-term, the EA says that it will not introduce some of the changes proposed in the consultation, including consolidating breaches of emission limit values in permits or suspending scores. However, it will introduce a change that allows a compliance score to be suspended beyond six months while work is undertaken to secure compliance.

In the long-term, the EA wants to move towards a common framework for regulating all environmental permitted sites. However, in the meantime there is a need for some differences in its approaches.

The consultation and new guidance are part of the EA’s transition to performance-based regulation (PBR) of sites with environmental permits, to replace its operator risk appraisal (Opra) approach. The guidance is an interim policy, pending development of the full PBR approach.