Failing to submit data for the Carbon Reduction Commitment before the deadline has caused four companies to be heavily penalised.
Once an organisation has established that they qualify as a participant in the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC) they will register on the CRC Registry. After registering, organisation’s need to abide by certain compliance requirements under the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, this means that they need to record and report the organisation’s carbon emissions.
A report needs to be submitted by the last working day in July, following the footprint in each phase the report must include information of all the energy supplied during the footprint year.
Organisations have to identify the emissions that they are required to include within their CRC scheme coverage. These reports help to monitor and verify an organisation’s compliance and performance.
In November of 2011, the CRC Performance league table was published, revealing the organisations that have committed to CRC and their rank.
The Performance League Table (PLT) ranks the relative performance of CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme participants against the three weighted metrics: Early Action Metric, Absolute Metric, and Growth Metric. Participants with the same weighted score are sorted alphabetically.
Participants are ranked according to how they have performed in the compliance year. The highest (best performance) is ranked at the top and the lowest (worst performance) is ranked at the bottom.
To view the CRC Performance league table, click here.
In an article published in Business Green the business web site offering companies the latest news and best-practice advice on how to become more environmentally responsible, it was said that four companies have been fined a total of £99,000 for reporting failures under corporate emissions cutting scheme, the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).
If reports are not submitted within 40 days of the cut-off date, organisations are subject to a £5,000 fine and the fine then increases by £500 everyday thereafter. The Environment Agency saw fit to levy the following companies; makers of Pritt Stick and Schwarzkopf hair products, who failed to submit their report.
Henkel was ordered to pay £38,000 for late submission of a footprint report and also an annual report required by regulation.
International Utility Saur’s UK were fined £41,000 for failing to submit last year’s report before the 29th of July, engineering company BI Group were fined £10,000 and Tomkins Ltd faced a penalty of £10,000 as well.
Using discretion to modify penalties, the Environment Agency will decrease the penalty if the firm has demonstrated that it took reasonable steps to comply with the order or tried to rectify the problem once they were made aware of it.
The CRC scheme requires that organisations with energy bills that exceed £500,000 a year to measure and pay for each tonne of CO2 which they emit. An Environment Agency spokeswoman speaking to Business Green confirmed that all the companies have paid their fines.
A spokeswoman spoke on behalf of Henkel said:
“Henkel confirms that due to a number of changes taking place in the company during 2011, it was not in a position to provide the data requested under the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme by the required deadline. The data was provided in full, not long after the deadline.”
Although there are regulations to abide by when registering under the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme there are many organisations which are meeting their targets and their efforts and scores can be seen in the Performance League Table (PLT).
What next for CRC?
Introduced in 2008 the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme is a government initiative for organisations to meet the qualification criteria based on how much electricity they consumed in 2008. The scheme has been set up to help organisations save money by reducing their energy bills as well as reducing carbon emissions.
Many critics are curious to know what the next step is for the scheme and the government are still required to issue their response to a consultation on simplifying the scheme, until then the CRC’s future remains unclear.
References:
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/business/127429.aspx
http://crc.environment-agency.gov.uk/pplt/web/plt/public/2010-11/CRCPerformanceLeagueTable20102011
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