First firms fined £99k for late CRC reports
The maker of Sellotape has been named as one of four companies fined a total of £99,000 for failing to meet the first reporting deadlines for the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency scheme (CRC)
International adhesive and beauty product manufacturer Henkel has had to pay a civil penalty amounting to £38,000 after submitting both its footprint scoping report and its annual emissions report more than five weeks past the deadline of 29 July 2011.
Participants that did not meet the cut-off date, but did submit data before 27 September, were subject to a fixed penalty of £5,000 and a further £500 fine for every day late the reports were filed.
Both Henkel and the Scottish arm of French utilities company Saur, which was fined £41,000, where forced to pay the daily penalties, while two other participants had the additional fines waived after the Environment Agency was satisfied they had taken “all reasonable steps” to comply with the deadline.
Coventry-based engineering firm BI Group and fellow engineering company, and maker of energy-efficient products, Tomkins, were both ordered to pay the fixed £10,000 penalty – £5,000 for each late report.
The first CRC performance league table, which was published last year, placed Tomkins joint 627th out of 2,103 organisations, with the company disclosing that its annual CRC emissions in 2010/11 were 5,326 tonnes of carbon dioxide (tCO2).
The other three companies receiving civil penalties were among 803 participants which scored zero against the early action metric – that is, the proportion of automatic meter readers voluntarily installed and participation in the Carbon Trust Standard or an equivalent scheme.
Henkel’s reported CRC emissions in 2010/11 were 6,470 tCO2, while BI Group and Saur UK emitted 4,642 tCO2 and 7,782 tCO2 respectively.
The news of the fines came after the closure of a DECC consultation on the future of the CRC and how to simplify compliance for the participants. In its response to the consultation, the CBI once again called for the CRC to be scrapped and replaced with a straight carbon tax.