The Environment Agency has outlined its approach to tackling environmental risk and responding to environmental incidents in its newly published corporate report on the Agency’s customer service commitment in England.

The report explains that the EA need to prioritise their activities on incidents that cause serious and significant risk, saying that it is unable to respond to every environmental incident reported to them.

After assessing the risk, it may decide In some cases that no further action will be taken.

The EA says it will use the information provided to build a picture of environmental threats – to enable targeted compliance, regulation and enforcement. It will also continue to regulate activities with an environmental permit so they can prevent damage to the environment.

The report also says the Agency will not provide feedback to individual reports of environmental incidents. 

Process for deciding what action to take

The information provided to the Environment Agency’s advisors is logged onto their system - they combine the incident information with other data which helps them to assess how serious the incident could be.

Some of the factors that determine how they will manage the incident are:

• scale of the harm to the environment or people
• duration
• number of times it has occurred

Environment Agency service standards are also set out which explain how long it will take them to respond. They aim to:

• acknowledge a general enquiry or complaint within 3 working days where possible and tell the customer when they will receive a response – the timing of which will depend on the complexity of the enquiry or complaint
• reply to Freedom of Information and Environment Information Regulation requests within 20 working days
• issue flood warnings as early as possible and within the published timescales
• respond to major incidents as quickly as possible and within the published timescales
• process permits as quickly as possible and within the statutory timescales

In some instances the Agency says it may need longer to respond and it will notify customers if it is unable to respond within the timescales. Examples include:

• if there is an incident
• they are being asked for complex information
• the EA needs to involve a third party

The report also sets out how the Agency will manage and respond to unacceptable and unreasonable behaviour, with definitions of what these types of behavoiur could consist of.

Click here to access the online report