Assessing and scoring environmental permit and licence compliance
How the Environment Agency assesses and scores compliance with environmental permits, abstraction licences and impounding licences.
- From:
- Environment Agency
- Published
- 14 January 2019
- Last updated
- 5 June 2026 — See all updates
Applies to England
Documents
Details
How the Environment Agency assesses and scores compliance for:
- abstraction and impounding licences
- discharges to surface water and groundwater permits
- radioactive substances activities permits
- waste operations and installations permits
- flood risk activities
These guides include:
- 6 principles which explain how the Environment Agency assesses and scores permit compliance
- an explanation of what happens after a compliance assessment
- an explanation of how the Environment Agency uses the results of an assessment, including how this affects subsistence charges for waste operations and installations
Updates to this page
-
5 June 2026
Added new document "Flood Risk Activities: assessing environmental permit compliance".
-
13 March 2025
Discharges to surface water and groundwater, section 'Explaining the outcomes of a compliance assessment' added information about the phased publication of CAR forms to the Environment Agency’s online public register on GOV.UK.
-
3 December 2024
Updated all the attachments to explain the timeframe for appealing a regulatory decision and linked to guidance on this. Updated 'Radioactive substances activities: assessing licence compliance', in the section 'Explaining the outcomes of a compliance assessment' to clarify when the Environment Agency send draft RASCARs to nuclear operators and how to appeal a regulatory decision. Updated Principle 6 in 'Waste operations and installations: assessing and scoring environmental compliance' to say that the Environment Agency will consider the wider impact on climate change for incidents involving the release of greenhouse gas.
-
16 January 2024
Updated the 'explaining the outcomes' section of each attachment to explain how to appeal a regulatory decision.
-
29 March 2023
Added the attachment 'Abstraction and impounding activities: assessing licence compliance'.
-
15 January 2020
In the document 'Waste operations and installations: assessing and scoring environmental permit compliance', we have updated the section ‘Explaining the outcomes of a compliance assessment’ – a permit holder can now challenge any part of the CAR form within 28 days of receipt.
-
4 July 2019
We added a publication to explain how we assess environmental permit compliance for radioactive substances activities. We made minor updates to the waste and water publications, including adding links to the radioactive substances activities publication.
-
2 April 2019
We've renamed the publication for assessing and scoring environmental permit compliance for waste operations and installations (including intensive farming). This guide does not apply to radioactive substances activities. We've added a publication to explain how we assess environmental permit compliance for discharges to surface water and groundwater.
-
14 January 2019
First published.
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Source
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/assessing-and-scoring-environmental-permit-and-licence-complianceCanonical document at the regulator. Always cite this URL — not the Vantage detail page — in compliance evidence.