Industries and public bodies in Scotland are being given the opportunity to comment on a new scheme to assess compliance with environmental licence conditions.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) is looking to streamline its compliance assessment scheme across four regulatory regimes and is urging operators of power stations, landfills and water & sewerage supply, fish famers and chemical manufacturers to comment on its consultation, published last Monday.

The watchdog has identified that improvements to its approach to assessing compliance with its licences, permits, authorisations and certain registrations will lead to more effective, transparent and efficient regulation. It is proposed to phase-in the new scheme from 1 January 2009.

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Colin Bayes, Director of Environmental Protection and Improvement said: "SEPA aims to be an excellent environmental regulator, enabling business to understand their environmental responsibilities, to comply with the regulations and to realise the many economic benefits of good environmental practice and performance.

"The new scheme is about SEPA streamlining compliance with licence conditions; it's not about asking industry and other waters users to provide additional data or increase reporting effort. The new scheme will be targeted, efficient and effective. It will help us to deliver the desired environmental outcomes by working directly with licence holders. Public scrutiny of the published compliance results, along with potential financial incentives, is intended to encourage better environmental performance."

The consultation was largely shaped by industry representatives at a workshop hosted by SEPA in May this year. Additionally, licence holders have volunteered to work alongside SEPA by participating in joint trials of the scheme during summer 2008.

(GK/JM)