SEPA – the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency – is proposing to replace the existing Operator Performance Assessment (OPA) system – the method by which it assesses how well businesses comply – with a new scheme which is deemed to be “more objective”.
Under the current OPA regime, environmental officers use a numerical system to judge compliance, which has been accused of being too “subjective”. However, the new system would see companies assessed according to a strict matrix looking at environmental performance against licence breaches – aimed at promoting consistency and fairness.
Sites that hold more than one licence will have each individual licence assessed, while sites that operate more than one activity will receive one overall compliance result. SEPA is keen to explain that the scheme will not alter the existing basic content of licences.
A separate consultation is also being planned on the possibility of providing financial benefits for businesses with high compliance and penalties for those of low compliance, to be taken into consideration when licences are renewed.
Colin Bayes, director of environmental protection and improvement, said: “The new scheme will be targeted, efficient and effective. It will help us to deliver the desired environmental outcomes by working directly with license holders. Public scrutiny of the published compliance results, along with potential financial incentives, is intended to encourage better environmental performance.”
He added: “The scheme is about SEPA streamlining compliance with license conditions; it's not about asking industry and other waters users to provide additional data or increase reporting effort.”
Conditions
Under the proposed system, holders of Waste Management Licences or Pollution Prevention and Control permits would be assessed using a matrix that would rate their environmental management performance as excellent, good, adequate, poor or very poor against how many times they breached their permits.
The public consultation document highlights that breaches do not necessarily have to involve any environmental impact to be taken into account, stating: “For example, an effluent discharge to a river which exceeded the licensed limits would be counted as a breach, even though it may have caused no environmental impact because the river was in spate.”
Introduction of the new assessment scheme is currently timetabled as January 2009 for the Pollution Prevention and Control permit, with the Waste Management Licenses and Controlled Activity Regulations (Point Source) due to be implemented in January 2010.
SEPA will publish the scheme's manual in December 2008 after taking consultation responses into account. With the exception of licenses with registered national security and/or commercial confidentiality issues, overall compliance assessment results for individual licenses will also be available to the public on request and on SEPA's website.
A Consultation on the proposed change is due to close on October 3. The move comes shortly after SEPA and the Scottish Government announced plans to overhaul the entire waste management licensing system, by consolidating 20 pieces of waste management legislation into one (see letsrecycle.com story).
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