Environmental Performance Assessment Scheme (EPAS) - a fair way to report performance​ 

Environmental harm caused is one of three key areas that determine the environmental performance rating, alongside compliance category and time taken to resolve non-compliance. If an operator causes a Category 1 or 2 event, their environmental performance rating will be ‘Unacceptable’. 

Figure 8: EPAS focus on environmental harm.

Section 8.1: Environmental harm

For environmental events, we use the definition of environmental harm set out in the Regulatory Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 (see Annex 4). 

Compliance with authorisation conditions and legal environmental requirements, which are set to protect the environment, should prevent unacceptable environmental harm occurring from regulated activities under normal circumstances. 

Section 8.2: Environmental events

For the purposes of EPAS, an environmental event is an incident that has either caused or is likely to have caused environmental harm. By “is likely to have caused” we mean there is evidence of an incident that is likely to cause environmental harm, even if the specific effects cannot be directly measured. For example, this may apply to discharges of toxic chemicals into groundwater or the seabed, such as from a long-sea outfall. 

It could also mean that the scale of an event is such that it is likely environmental harm will have been caused. In this situation it could be prohibitively expensive to obtain physical evidence, or equipment that should have gathered the required data could have malfunctioned during the event. 

For EPAS, we only include environmental events that are caused by activities in which we are the relevant regulatory authority. We do not include events where another statutory body is the relevant regulatory authority, such as discharges to sewers or breaches of Health & Safety requirements. However, we work in partnership with other statutory bodies where appropriate. It does not apply to naturally occurring events such as pollen deposits, volcanic dust, fish mortality from naturally occurring high temperatures or lightning strikes, or natural river foaming. 

Environmental events may be caused by equipment malfunction, an accident, an inappropriate activity, or any other incident. 

We categorise environmental events according to the severity of environmental harm caused, see Figure 9. We have recently reviewed our environmental events categorisation and plan to start using these new categories when our major non-compliance criteria come into effect. The new categories are included as Annex 4. 

Figure 9: Environmental event categories.

Category 1 and 2 represent more serious environmental events. If an operator causes environmental harm at the level of a Category 1 or 2 environmental event, this will automatically result in an ‘Unacceptable’ environmental performance rating. This means, even if the issues that caused the major non-compliance are resolved quickly, a ‘Below expectations’ environmental performance rating cannot be retained. 

Category 3 environmental events will result in a ‘Non-compliant’ category. More than four Category 3 environmental events with the same cause in twelve months will result in a ‘Major non-compliant’ category. 

Section 8.3: Exacerbating and mitigating factors

Some environmental events will be more or less serious as a result of the sensitivity of receptors or impact to communities. Similar incidents can have widely differing impacts due to the nature of the environment in which they happen and the local or wider circumstances. For instance, an unauthorised abstraction during periods of high flows will have a lower impact than an unauthorised abstraction during a period of water scarcity. 

These factors will form part of the environmental event category assessment and may result in environmental events that initially seem to be comparable falling into different environmental event categories. It is important that both we and operators take the environmental circumstances into account while assessing environmental harm. Exacerbating and mitigating factors are detailed in Annex 4.