The announcement, from the Department for Business, comes ahead of the January 31 deadline for schemes to post their final WEEE evidence for the 2014 compliance period.
Now, attention is expected to focus on the level of the compliance fee and how BIS chooses to set it in terms of the level of ‘penalty cost’ applied to schemes who fail to acquire sufficient evidence.
The revised WEEE regulations, which came into effect from January 2014, establish a system of household WEEE collection targets for producer compliance schemes. Under the regulations there is also an option that should a scheme fail to meet its collection targets, it can pay a ‘compliance fee’ to meet the cost of its members’ obligations.
Three proposals for how the compliance fee should be calculated were submitted in October – with BIS to announce next week which will be adopted for the 2014 compliance period.
Fee
Schemes will not learn how much they would be required to pay through the fee until after every scheme has submitted its final evidence.
Had BIS chosen not to go ahead with the fee, schemes that may have been unable to secure enough evidence to meet their obligations could have been at risk of prosecution for being in breach of the regulations.
But, according to some in the WEEE sector, by confirming that the fee will go ahead in 2014 BIS has altered the ‘market dynamics’ between schemes at the end of the compliance year. This is because the department, for any schemes who may not have secured enough WEEE evidence by the 31 January, has reduced the incentive to purchase it at an inflated price from those schemes with a surplus.
Consultation
In information to schemes issued this morning, a BIS official said: “Following the consultation held last autumn, I am writing to inform you that the Government has decided to approve a compliance fee methodology and administrator for the 2014 WEEEE compliance period as provided under the 2013 WEEE Regulations. Three proposals were received and we will announce details of the winning bid week commencing 2 February.”
Revised regulations came into effect from January 2014 bringing the requirements of the recast EU WEEE Directive into UK law and to address concerns from producers that the cost of compliance with the regulations did not reflect the true cost of recycling.
The three proposed methodologies for calculating the compliance fee have come from online marketplace The Environment Exchange (T2E), the Joint Trades Association (JTA) and a combined submission from Dataserv, DHL, Transform, Valpak and Veolia (see letsrecycle.com story).
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