Talking Dirty – An Environmental Blog: SEPA’s new Permitting Charging Scheme.
Date: 09/03/2016 | Environmental, Blogs
Back and still brief, this version of ‘Talking Dirty’ is a heads up to all regulated industries about the new permitting charging scheme being brought in by SEPA (the Scottish Environment Protection Agency) from 1st April 2016.
The new scheme consolidates 100 separate charges (within 5 charging schemes) into 17 tiers of charge based on the complexity of an application.
There will be some major changes made to annual charges for new permits including (a) an activity component to the fee (such as where the manufacturing of chemicals is involved) and (b) an environmental fee based on the emissions of the permitted activity (e.g. to the atmosphere).
If you are an operator with an existing SEPA permit, the new increases or reductions, as the case may be, will be gradually worked into your existing charges between the introduction of the new scheme in April and 2020/21.
From 2018/19 operators with PPC permits will be penalised for poor performance and environmental compliance by way of a new ‘compliance factor’ which will be applied in the calculation of the annual charges payable and could, in serious cases, double the charges.
For multiple activities at the same site and for small-scale operators, there will be a range of discounts or reductions available against the full application charges and the charge for surrendering permits which are no longer required will be removed.
Anyone affected should receive a letter from SEPA during the course of this month providing details of how your charges will be impacted.
If any of you have any views, comments or suggestions of specific ‘dirt’ that you would like to see discussed here then please get in touch – email, phone, twitter or linked-in. I’ll be back with another blog post again soon!
