Enforcement review: Report of conclusions

The Review has now produced its report. It envisions an enforcement system where businesses are confident that the worst offenders are dealt with through tough sanctions and the good intentions of the responsible majority are recognised. It aims to support work towards a more consistent regulatory approach and to strengthen incentives for operators to comply with their environmental obligations.

Further work would be needed to assess the value, costs and benefits of these ideas in particular regulatory areas.

Some of the obstacles identified by the Review are that:

• enforcement systems are not based on a full understanding of operator attitudes and motivations
• criminal sentences generally do not do all that is expected of them, undermining the impact of regulation
• regulators do not always have the right sanctions to use
• regulators do not always have explicit environmental enforcement policies

Some of the possible solutions offered by the Review are that:

• sentencing in environmental cases should be more transparently related to the purposes of enforcement – making damage good and making amends to affected communities, removing wrongful economic gain, and exposing moral blame
• regulators should have more types of sanction available including variable administrative penalties, so that enforcement action will be more proportionate to the offence
• clear enforcement policies and effective data collection would ensure transparency and promote consistency
• communities could be further involved in detecting environmental offences and in helping to understand their impact

The Government is considering how best to take forward the report’s ideas and conclusions. They contribute to work going on within Defra and environmental regulators to improve the effectiveness and the fairness of environmental enforcement as part of wider regulation.

Further detail is contained in the report, with more supporting evidence and analysis set out in the annexes:

• Review of enforcement in environmental regulation: report of conclusions (406 KB)
• Annex A: Detailed "map" of enforcement system (22 KB)
• Annex B: Review of evidence (221 KB)
• Annex C: Administrative penalties (41 KB)
• Annex D: Court case studies (70 KB)

The reports above are published as Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format files.
Further information is available on our Help page about downloading or reading Adobe Acrobat documents.