News this week about ESOS deadline
Although The EA cannot move the deadline date set by the EU, it has said they won't beapplying any penalties as long as teh EA are kept informed and they receive first notification of a late submission by Dec 5th
Finally the Environment agency has made the announcement we have been waiting on. It was clear some time ago that the compliance date of December 5th for the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) was not going to be met by a large number of firms affected. Whilst the date is set by European legislation and cannot be pushed further down the road, the government does have the power to modify any enforcement action and penalties relating to non-compliance.
What the environment agency has done is state that it does not expect to normally take enforcement action on any organisation that manages to submit their ESOS audit by January 29th 2016. However the organisation must have notified the environment agency by December 5th that they are going to be late, giving the reason why they are going to be late and when they expect to be ready to submit. Any business using the alternative route of becoming ISO50001 to also be compliant with ESOS has until June 30th 2016.
The Environment Agency has also backed up this with statements about how this hasn’t changed anything any of the regulations around ESOS it is just allowing more time. The Agency have also stated that companies should still continue to be compliant for Dec 5th and any companies that are taking the original deadline more seriously will be looked more favourably upon, whatever that means. Any evidence of booking a lead assessor or collating data for ESOS should be logged as evidence of your efforts to become compliant.
The latest information shows less than 400 of the estimated 10,000+ companies that fall under the new energy efficiency regulations are fully compliant. The Environment Agency expects around 5,000 applications to be filed over the next few weeks, but industry insiders are convinced thousands of businesses are likely to miss the 5 December deadline for compliance.
The good news comes in our final statement from the Environment Agency “We plan to normally use enforcement notices where necessary and serve civil penalties only in the most serious cases”
If you are still looking for an ESOS lead assessor please do contact Utilitas Solutions, we have people on hand to help you get compliant.