CRC: government confirms no change to annual report publication

Practical Law UK Legal Update 7-582-1245 (Approx. 3 pages)

CRC: government confirms no change to annual report publication

by Practical Law Environment

Background: consultation on enhancing the ARP

As part of CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC) simplification, announced in 2012, the annual report publication (ARP) has replaced the performance league tables (PLTs) that the Environment Agency (EA) was previously required to publish each year. The ARP contains information about CRC participants' aggregated energy use and emissions. The first ARP, for 2012-13, was published in March 2014.

In May 2014, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published a discussion paper on enhancing the ARP for CRC participants.

DECC proposed amending the ARP to:

Include information about renewable energy, and gas and electricity supply data.
Provide information on participants' uptake of energy efficiency measures.
Publish non-commercially sensitive data, held by the government, for use by third parties.

For more information on

The detail of the consultation, and the introduction of the ARP instead of annual league tables, see Legal update, CRC: government publishes discussion paper on enhancing annual report publication: Background: scrapping of CRC performance league tables and introduction of the annual report publication
The CRC in general, see CRC Survival Kit.

DECC responds to ARP consultation

On 22 September 2014, DECC published its response to the May 2014 consultation on enhancing the ARP.

DECC states that there was very limited support for the proposals. Respondents' main concerns were:

Making more changes to the CRC at this stage is unnecessary so soon after the major simplification of the scheme in 2013. CRC participants want some stability while the simplification changes are bedding in.
Publishing further information on renewables would dilute the main focus of the CRC as an energy efficiency scheme and be confusing. Participants felt that the purpose of the ARP should be to highlight what the government is seeking to achieve on energy efficiency through the whole of the CRC scheme rather than a specific focus on renewables within the ARP.
Releasing energy use and supply data would risk the publication of commercially confidential information by potentially revealing production volumes and could allow competitors to calculate commodity costs.
Turnover data does not provide a consistent and meaningful way to measure and explain changes in energy consumption. In many cases, there is a mismatch between a company’s turnover data and its CRC energy use, for example where a company reports on a group basis, but only part of the group’s operations fall within the CRC.

Next steps: no change

DECC states that the changes proposed to the ARP are small and do not impose any new burdens on participants. However, DECC accepts that participants would prefer some stability as the recent changes to the CRC continue to take effect. Therefore, it has decided not to implement any of the proposals in the discussion paper to amend the ARP. This means that future publications of the ARP will be consistent with previous versions.

Source

DECC: Enhancing the CRC Annual Report Publication: Government response (September 2014).

End of Document

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Resource ID 7-582-1245

Published on 23-Sep-2014

Resource Type Legal update: archive

Jurisdiction

United Kingdom