Environment Agency told staff to delay inspections to stay on target last year
The Environment Agency told staff in September to stop inspecting the most poorly performing waste sites until January in order to meet corporate compliance targets, it can be revealed.
The regulator has been accused of “massaging the figures”, with an insider telling the Ends Report and the Guardian that a lack of resources means the body is “failing to do its statutory duty in a timely manner”.
Under the Environment Agency’s corporate targets, the regulator aims to ensure that 97% of all regulated sites, such as landfills, are complying with their permits.
In an email sent on 20 September last year, and seen by the Ends Report and the Guardian, a senior installations manager for waste sites in Nottingham emailed staff to warn that the region was at risk of missing this corporate target.
“The KPI [key performance indicator, a way companies measure performance] says that we have to have 97% of our sites in compliance band A B C, which effectively means we are ‘allowed’ no more than 3% in D E F. 3% of our sites equals 23.2 sites. Therefore we are aiming for 23 – NO MORE,” they wrote.
The agency identifies any non-compliances in the course of a calendar year and uses this information to work out a compliance rating based on a points system. Based on the cumulative score over a calendar year, each site is placed into one of six compliance bands from A to F.
Sites in bands A and B have demonstrated an expected level of permit compliance, sites in bands C and D must improve in order to achieve compliance and sites in bands E and F must significantly improve in order to achieve compliance. The score determines the level of annual subsistence fees regulated firms must pay to the Environment Agency.
In the email, the manager asked officers to “PAUSE UNTIL JAN work which is not absolutely necessary to do now”.
Responding to the email, a technical lead officer raised concerns with this plan and warned that there are already environmental problems with waste sites in the east Midlands region that could be exacerbated if they paused inspection work.
On 28 September, the junior member of staff was told by a separate team leader: “If you still feel uncomfortable with our direction when we’ve seen the reviews and reflected on our best course of action, we’d like to offer you the opportunity to work on other projects instead that have a higher priority to us to remove any conflicts that may exist for you.”
Speaking on the condition of strict anonymity, one Environment Agency insider said that this statement “upset a lot of colleagues in that office and those who work in that part of the business because the managers were basically saying: ‘We don’t care about your professional judgment, we are just chasing this number.’”
This team leader emphasised again that it was important to “maintain our D E F KPI as far as we can as it’s an externally reported KPI that is coming under heavy scrutiny at the moment”.
The direction was given to “pause any work that may foreseeably result in a site moving into D E F”.
The team leader asked the officer to “produce a forward plan” to explain what they would do to ensure the risk with the specific waste site of concern was mitigated, but said “we’d prefer this to start from January”.
“In the meantime, we can decide the best way to service the band U without setting hares off that we can’t control or haven’t the resources to deal with,” they wrote.
Band U are sites that have not been classified because they have not been inspected.
An Environment Agency insider said the fact the instruction related to the most poorly performing sites was “evil”.
“It’s saying: stop looking at the sites that we know are the worst,” they said. “This is indicative of the fact that we are failing to do our statutory duty in a timely manner. It’s a method of massaging the figures to make it appear that the situation is better than it is.
“As soon as you know that a site is causing problems then you need to deal with it. But the easy way to make that problem go away is to not see the site as a problem. The external problem hasn’t gone away, but what they’re doing here is trying not to create an internal problem by pretending they haven’t noticed the issue,” they said.
The insider said the problem was down to resourcing, and that ultimately the Environment Agency’s budget had been cut to such an extent that it was unable to regulate properly.
“By not exceeding that traffic light target in our KPIs it’s a very simplistic indicator that we as a business are not doing all the proper stuff that underpins that,” they said. “It shouldn’t just be an absolute bloody traffic light target. But the reality is that everything is broken to the extent that we are playing silly buggers with the numbers just to reach the targets we have set ourselves.”
An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “These claims are incorrect – our work to regulate these sites did not stop. We are responsible for over 600 waste and installation sites in the east Midlands, and it is not unusual to prioritise work on those which pose the greatest risk to the environment, for example, those with hazardous waste.
“Last year, all these sites received their necessary inspections by our officers – and we already have compliance plans in place for the forthcoming year, to ensure they meet our high standards.”
However, the insider said that to claim all sites received their necessary inspections was “disingenuous” because the staff decided what “necessary” was.
“The subtext of that statement is that we define what necessary looks like, and what these individuals said [was] that for those poorly performing sites, we are not going to look. It’s like putting a telescope up to your blind eye and saying: ‘What signal, I see no signal,’” they said.
Commenting on the emails, Helen Venn, the chief regulatory officer at the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), the government’s post-Brexit green regulator, said: “It is crucial for all government departments and public bodies to keep accurate records. Monitoring compliance with environmental law is a critical component of effective environmental regulation. We are undertaking work to consider the implementation and effectiveness of legislative frameworks and associated arrangements in relation to compliance monitoring.”