Environmental Performance Assessment Scheme (EPAS) - a fair way to report performance
Section 5: What is the environmental performance rating?
Figure 1: The three key parts of EPAS: compliance category, time taken to resolve non-compliance and environmental harm caused.
We expect all operators to undertake regulated activities in compliance with their financial and legal environmental requirements for that regime including any specific conditions attached to the authorisations they may hold. This includes paying our annual charges on time. This is the minimum that we expect. Our experience is that most operators take these responsibilities seriously.
However, where operators fall below these expectations, we need a robust and clear assessment scheme that allows us to categorise where and why non-compliance has occurred. This includes the actions of the operator to avoid causing environmental harm and resolve any non-compliance quickly.
To reflect this, there will be three parts to the environmental performance rating:
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Compliance: how serious any non-compliance was.
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Time: how long it took to correct any non-compliance.
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Environmental harm: the level of any environmental harm caused.
The environmental performance rating is designed to incentivise good levels of environmental performance and help prevent non-compliance.
An environmental performance rating will have no relationship to any decision we take on whether to take enforcement action where legal requirements have not been met.
The three parts to the environmental performance rating are detailed in Table 1. We think this is a fair way to rate operators.
Table 1: Information used to calculate the environmental performance rating.
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Parts of environmental performance |
What do we mean? |
|
Level of compliance |
Was the operator compliant, non-compliant or major non-compliant with their legal environmental responsibilities or conditions attached to the relevant authorisation? |
|
Time taken to resolve non-compliance |
Was the non-compliance corrected quickly, or did it take months or years to resolve? |
|
Environmental harm |
Was environmental harm caused equivalent to a Category 1 or 2 environment event? |
To ensure the scheme is simple, understandable and good value to implement, there are three performance ratings, see table 2.
Table 2: The environmental performance rating and what this means.
|
Environmental performance rating |
What does this mean? |
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Good |
An operator will either be fully compliant or have some non-compliance that was resolved quickly. |
|
Below expectations |
An operator may have had an instance of major non-compliance which was resolved quickly or some non-compliance that took a bit longer to resolve. Any environmental harm caused would be a Category 3 or 4 environmental event. |
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Unacceptable |
An operator may have had repeat major non-compliance, failed to deal with any non-compliance identified or caused a Category 1 or 2 environmental event. |
When it is not possible to resolve non-compliance immediately, we expect operators to prepare an appropriate compliance recovery plan. When a compliance recovery plan is in place that we have confirmed includes reasonable steps to resolve non-compliance in a timely manner, this will be published alongside the environmental performance rating. This is to ensure we fairly represent the actions operators are taking to achieve compliance.
How level of compliance, time in non-compliance and environmental harm interact to determine the environmental performance rating can be viewed in figure 2. More detail of the environmental performance rules is available in section 9.
Figure 2: Environmental performance rating as it relates to level of compliance, time to resolve non-compliance and environmental harm caused.
We want to ensure that these ratings are easily understood and what the ratings are called both reflects the risk operators pose to the environment and acts as an incentive for operators to proactively avoid any non-compliance with legal environmental requirements.