A total of 10 companies have been issued with penalties by the Environment Agency for not meeting reporting requirements under the carbon reduction commitment energy efficiency scheme (CRC), according to a report by the agency.
The scheme requires companies using more than 6,000MWh of electricity a year to report on carbon emissions and pay for allowances to cover their energy use. The agency has the power to issue fines for firms that do not comply.
Since the start of CRC in April 2010, 10 organisations have been issued with civil penalties for failing to submit reports, the agency said. Six of these received two civil penalties: one for failing to submit an annual report on time, and one for failing to submit a footprint report by the set deadline. The remaining four participants received a penalty for failing to meet the date for submitting their annual report only.
The report states that the number of firms that were compliant with the deadline for submitting their annual report for 2013/14 is 97%, a slight drop since the previous year, when it was 99%.
The proportion of firms meeting the deadline this year is the same as in 2011/12, though the number of firms required to submit reports has fallen from 2,037 then to 1,968 in 2103/14, the agency data shows.
A spokesman for the agency said: “Compliance with the deadline was only slightly less this year than in previous years, and overall the compliance levels have been high in all years of the scheme. We are not yet sure of the reason for this slight decline. This is still a high compliance figure.”
Fines for failing to meet the CRC reporting deadlines now total more than £350,000, says the report.
In the past year, the estate agents, Harbour Exchange Management Company, was fined £179,952 by the agency; pharmaceutical manufacturers Aptuit (Glasgow) Limited was fined £3,500; and Mansfield College, which is part of the University of Oxford, was fined £2,500.
The energy department is currently evaluating the CRC to feed into the government’s full review of the scheme in 2016.
