Regulators

Your local authority or the Environment Agency (or where appropriate, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency) will be the regulator for the FGG Regulations 2009.  For the equivalent Northern Ireland Regulations, your District Council or the Northern Ireland Environment and Heritage Service will be the regulator. Whether it is your local authority or one of the other organisations who contacts you depends on your business and any existing arrangements with them, or permits from them, that you have.

Where a local authority is the regulator, a variety of its departments could take action. It is expected that Trading Standards, Environmental Health or Food Safety would be the relevant department undertaking F gas regulatory work. Which one will depend on the type of authority, for example, whether it is a unitary or district council. Also, if a local authority department already has an agreement or relationship with an organisation in their region, it is likely they would take the lead.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will be the regulator for the offshore oil and gas installations.

Powers of regulators

A regulator has a range of options at its disposal to protect the environment and will use the option or options it believes will best ensure compliance with the FGG Regulations 2009. If an organisation does not comply with these regulations, the action taken by the regulator may include:

• providing targeted advice and guidance to an organisation to secure compliance.
• serving an “enforcement notice”. A regulator may serve an enforcement notice if it is of the opinion that a person has contravened, is contravening or is likely to contravene relevant requirements of the regulations. The contents of an enforcement notice must include a description of the contravention, specification of steps suitable remedy and a date by which time the remedies must be in effect.
• serving a “prohibition notice”. A regulator will use this type of notice where specific requirements are contravened or there is a risk that they will be contravened and such contravention will involve “an imminent danger of serious pollution of the environment”. Prohibition notices allow the regulator to insist on a piece of equipment or even a whole site being shut down.

The penalties

A person who commits an offence under these regulations is liable:

• on summary conviction, to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum
• on conviction on indictment, to a fine.

Enforcement activities

Upcoming work

• Planned enforcement activities 2011/12 (PDF 100KB)

Previous work

We have been working closely with regulators over the last 2 years (including the Environment Agency and local authorities) to ensure that there is good compliance with the EU F gas and Ozone Regulations amongst end users and contractors. To demonstrate the type of activities that have been undertaken by the regulators, and to give useful examples of the good and bad practices regulators have found, we have written four brief summaries of regulatory interventions:

• Recent regulatory activities (PDF 150KB)

The approach taken by regulators is to issue a request for information. The feedback from this information request is then used to judge compliance and to stimulate further regulator activity as necessary. For example, if the response is inadequate the regulator clarifies the key problems and sets a timetable for corrective action. In all cases this approach has led to a good resolution of any areas of non-compliance.