Out-Law News 2 min. read
27 Feb 2013, 11:03 am
Construction companies BAM Group and Skanska top the final table for 2011/12, with Motorola, Manchester City Council and Bradford and Bingley making up the rest of the top five.
The Government announced that the PLT would be scrapped in December, as part of wide-ranging simplifications to the CRC. Participants' energy use and emissions data will continue to be published but in an aggregated form. The CRC and the PLT have attracted wide ranging criticism from companies that fall within its scope due to its complexity and administrative costs.
Environmental law expert Linda Fletcher of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that the new table did not make it easy to measure how successful the CRC had been in encouraging businesses to individually take steps to reduce their emissions due to the three metrics and weighting system used to rank participants.
"As expected, the 2011/12 PLT has been prepared with reference to three metrics and a weighting system for each of those: the early action, absolute and growth metric," she said. "Whether this usefully reflects the energy efficiency measures that participants have been putting in place since publication of the first PLT in 2011 is questionable but more importantly it is not easy to measure how successful the CRC scheme has been in encouraging business to individually take steps to reduce emissions. It would have been helpful to perhaps also show a participant's ranking in the previous PLT."
"Participants had already raised concerns as to the interpretation of the metrics and the ranking of participants in one table regardless of the sector in which they operate, which made any meaningful analysis difficult. This PLT was itself delayed as a result of a number of participants having to resubmit data, and we know that this is the last PLT that will be published by the EA," she said.
Fletcher added that the future publication of participants' aggregated emissions would "enable an easier comparison to be made each year as to the UK's emission levels from buildings and the trajectory that is needed to deliver the Climate Change Act 2008 targets".
The CRC is a mandatory scheme based on energy consumption that is aimed at improving energy efficiency and cutting CO2 emissions in large public and private sector organisations that are not caught by the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). CRC participants must measure and report on their emissions and purchase allowances to cover emissions. Currently, over 2,000 organisations are required to take part in the scheme.
The PLT rankings in the 2011/12 table are determined with reference to three metrics and then measured as percentages: the early action metric, the absolute metric and the growth metric. The first of these metrics measures whether participants took voluntary steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions before the CRC began. The absolute metric measures how the participant's emissions changed over the previous compliance year and the growth metric measures the participant's change in emissions relative to its turnover.
The Government set out 46 simplifications to the CRC in its response to a consultation exercise, published at the end of last year. As well as scrapping the PLT, the number of reportable fuels will be reduced from 29 to two: electricity, and gas when used for heating purposes. Other simplifications will see the removal of the '90% rule', which required all participants to account for their carbon footprint emissions, and the introduction of an organisation-wide 2% de minimis threshold for gas for heating. The application of the CRC to the landlord and tenant relationship will remain unchanged save that ground leases with a minimum term of 30 years will not fall under the landlord and tenant supply rules.
The majority of the changes will take effect in 2014 at the start of the second phase of the CRC. In addition, the Government has pledged to review the effectiveness of the scheme in 2016 and to remove the tax element of the CRC as a "high priority" when public finances allow.
