Environmental Performance Assessment Scheme
The Environmental Performance Assessment Scheme (EPAS) is our proposed replacement to our 2009-2019 Compliance Assessment Scheme.
EPAS consultation
Our consultation on the proposed Environmental Performance Assessment Scheme runs from 31 March to 30 June 2025. We really want to hear your views.
After the consultation we will provide a consultation digest setting out the feedback we received and what we are going to do as a result.
We will start to apply our new environmental events framework and major non-compliance criteria later this year. This is to give regulated business the opportunity to gain experience of these before EPAS starts.
By the end of March 2026, we will provide clarity on how and when we will implement EPAS. This is to allow sufficient time to consider feedback from the consultation and what this means for our digital system requirements.
View the EPAS consultation document, 1.8 MB (PDF document).
Further related documents and response forms can be found on the consultation hub.
Why do we need an environmental performance assessment scheme?
EPAS is an important part of our approach to regulation. As Scotland’s principal environmental regulator, we regulate activities that could lead to pollution or environmental harm. The relevant environmental requirements are set out in legislation.
Certain activities simply require compliance with the legislation. Some activities require specific authorisation before they can be carried out lawfully. Every activity we authorise is subject to conditions that must be adhered to by the relevant operator. For activities that fall within our regulatory remit, we check compliance, and we use a range of tools to ensure operators resolve any compliance issues identified.
EPAS will support our approach to regulation by providing us with a common standard to rate an operator’s environmental performance and secure improvements in compliance.
Purpose
The key purpose of EPAS is to:
- Increase overall levels of compliance
- Influence behaviour, incentivising regulated business to:
- take all necessary steps to prevent non-compliance from occurring
- remedy non-compliance as quickly and as effectively as possible - Provide us with information so we can target our regulatory efforts more effectively
- Allow us to demonstrate the results of our regulatory activity on a continuous basis
Benefits
There are key benefits for regulated business. The environmental performance rating will:
- more accurately reflect actions operators are taking by considering a wider range of relevant factors, including how quickly they resolve compliance issues.
- benefit those who value the importance of remaining compliant by making their environmental performance easily accessible and understandable.
Checking compliance
We expect operators to comply with their legal environmental requirements. We check compliance in various ways - through site visits and inspections, investigating events and incidents, sampling discharges and through assessment of operator data. This enables us to take action to protect people and the environment.
Whilst we stopped using our Compliance assessment scheme during the COVID-19 pandemic, our work to check compliance and tackle non-compliance has never stopped.
We have continued to communicate the outcome of this work directly to authorisation holders, advising them of their compliance category: compliant, non-compliant or major non-compliant.
Where necessary, we took enforcement action in accordance with our Enforcement Policy.
Our compliance verification will continue as planned. Operators can continue to discuss the outcomes of these checks with us should they disagree with the compliance verification outcome.
We will communicate with operators as we have been doing.
We will introduce our new environmental events framework and major non-compliance criteria later this year.
We will provide clarity on how and when we will implement EPAS by 31 March 2026.
Since 2023 we have been clear that the onus is on operators to resolve any compliance issues quickly.
They should demonstrate compliance to us using appropriate evidence e.g. monitoring information, video, photographs, remote tour.
We will review the evidence provided and only re-visit the site where necessary to confirm the compliance category.
When an operator resolves any compliance issues, we will record the date the are compliant as the date they submitted evidence demonstrating compliance (not the date when we reviewed this evidence).
No. We have been very clear since April 2023 that no attempts should be made to do so. This is because the assessment as compliant, non-compliant or major non-compliant is not an overall assessment or comparable with an historic CAS score which rated an operator for a year according to their compliance over that year.
Whether an operator is now categorised as ‘Compliant’, ‘Non-compliant’ or ‘Major non-compliant’ reflects the outcome of the compliance verification activity on that date. Where compliance issues were identified, an operator will remain categorised as ‘Non-compliant’ or ‘Major non-compliant’ until we receive evidence that the relevant issues have been resolved.
No. The rules driving EPAS are different to how we derived a CAS score. We will make this clear when we implement EPAS.