The Environment Agency has announced improvements to the way it regulates water company discharges to strike a better balance between improving the environment, rewarding good environmental performance and taking tough action against those who fail to meet acceptable standards.

Following last year’s consultation on ‘Risk based regulation of discharges to water: Encouraging better environmental performance by business’, the Environment Agency has incorporated input from industry and environmental stakeholders ahead of introducing the changes in April 2009.

This new approach to regulating discharges to water uses an Operator and Pollution Risk Appraisal (OPRA) system and Operating Self Monitoring (OSM) to ensure direct links between the risk of an activity, the environmental performance of an operator and the charges levied under the polluter-pays principle.

Environment Agency Director of Environment Protection Tricia Henton said: “The Environment Agency wants operators to take a greater responsibility for their environmental impact. Modern regulation is all about allocating resources proportionate to risk, so that businesses are performance driven and the end result is a better environment.”

The Environment Agency regulates 110,000 discharge consents in England and Wales across many sectors, including industrial operators, breweries, fish-farms, mines and quarries; but the changes will first be introduced to water companies which are responsible for 70% of all consented discharges to water.

Tricia Henton continued: “Water companies have the potential to secure the biggest environmental gains through regulatory change and are best equipped to implement the changes, with many already having monitoring mechanisms in place.”

The changes will mean responsibility for monitoring discharges will transfer to operators (OSM), using formally certified monitoring systems to collect, analyse and report on the quality of discharges. The Environment Agency will audit all operator procedures and undertake formal inspection of all sites to ensure procedures are robust and discharge results are compliant with consents.

“Operator Self Monitoring is consistent with the approach used by the Drinking Water Inspectorate to assure the quality of the water we all drink,” said Tricia Henton.

This allows the Environment Agency to focus regulatory efforts on the worst environmental performers – using OPRA to assess pollution hazards, determine how many inspections a site should receive based on that hazard risk and how much the operator should pay in fees and charges.

Tricia Henton continued: “OPRA and OSM have been successfully applied over many years in the regulation of our most hazardous waste sites under the Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) regime.

“By giving operators the incentive of reduced charges to improve performance and reduce risk, the outcome is better for the environment.”

The Environment Agency will continue its existing environmental monitoring and surveillance program which is already used to help identify operators that have breached their discharge consents or been responsible for pollution incidents.

“