Consultation on improving enforcement

26 August 2011

Natural England are currently consulting on its existing compliance and enforcement strategy. It can be accessed here: http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/Images/improving-compliance-and-enforcement-consultation_tcm6-27480.pdf

In 2010 the government introduced legislation that gave the Environment Agency and Natural England access to civil sanctions. Prior to this the only choices had been either to issue a compliance notice or to undertake criminal proceedings for offences they enforced, and thus their strategy is being reformed.

Proportionate and consistent enforcement are the key aims of the strategy and to this end they are proposing expanding their classification of offences from just major and minor to technical, minor, medium and significant in order to better differentiate the gravity of offence. However, the offences will be classified primarily according to the impact on the environment, and only secondarily by a list of aggravating factors, which includes whether the offence was accidental or deliberate.

Their main aim is to achieve restoration of the environment and they expect the costs of this to be borne by the offender, although they do recognise that in many cases the best restoration will be to let nature recover for itself. When considering the amount of the variable financial penalties they will also give consideration to removing any financial gain from the offender and deterrence.

They also propose allowing enforcement undertakings where the offender can tell Natural England of the offence, damage and remedial action they will take. After agreement no further sanctions would then be imposed.

The final section states that in future they would like these civil sanctions to be extended. At present they cover things like offences in SSSIs, but could be applied much more broadly in future.