Business faces fines as CRC Deadline looms
Sign-up process could take longer than the 6 days left until the deadline
Businesses are being warned that registering with the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme could take weeks, as the 30 September deadline fast approaches. With just 6 days until the deadline, there are still approximately 10,000 companies yet to sign up to the scheme as participants, non-corporate information declarers and corporate information declarers. The scheme came into force on 1 April.
on365 have warned that the Environment Agency’s application process could take up to four weeks. “Administration delays could mean the application takes longer than the 5 working days remaining,” said Chris Smith, sales and marketing director at on365.
“The monetary penalties of missing the deadline could be financially crippling for a number of CRC eligible businesses, and the reputational damage from a company being listed as non-compliant could be irreversible.”
However, a spokesperson for the Environment Agency insisted that the agency would not be using the deadline as an opportunity to penalise organisations. She said that organisations would not be penalised “as long as you have made your best effort to get registered, if there’s a genuine reason." But she refused to be drawn on how long a registering process could take: “It depends on the nature of the organisation. How long is a piece of string?" she said.
Participants of the CRC scheme are organisations that consumed at least 6,000 megawatt hours of electricity through all of their meters during 2008, which is equivalent to an electricity bill of around ?500,000, and are required to participate in the scheme by monitoring their energy consumption and purchasing allowances.
As of 13 September, 2,209 participants, 609 non-corporate information declarers and 6,740 corporate information declarers had registered with the Environment Agency. The agency expects around 20,000 organisations to register in total. Eligible organisations who do not register by the deadline will be fined ?5,000, plus an additional ?500 per day for each subsequent working day they fail to register up to a maximum of 80 working days.
Meanwhile, a survey released last week, by document management software company Version One, revealed that 22 percent of IT directors had not heard of the CRC scheme. The snapshot survey of 86 IT directors and managers across a range of UK public and private sector organisations also found that while 42 percent were aware of the scheme, they did not know if their organisation qualified for it. Just 28% of respondents said they were aware of the scheme and had investigated their organisation’s eligibility.