Environment Agency Launches Consultation on Industrial Emissions Permitting Reform

The Environment Agency (“EA”), supported by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (“Defra”), has launched a consultation on reforms to the environmental permitting regime for industrial emissions in England. This follows announcements made earlier in March this year as part of government’s action plan to ensure regulators and regulation support growth.

The consultation, open until 21 October 2025, sets out proposals to modernise the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016 (“EPR 2016”) with a view to streamline regulation, enable innovation, and support the UK’s clean energy ambitions. This could represent a pivotal moment in the UK’s regulatory landscape as the proposals seek to align industrial pollution control with economic, environmental, and technological ambitions.

Background

The industrial emissions permitting framework has delivered significant environmental benefits over the past three decades, including a 97% reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions and over £52 billion in health and productivity gains.[1] However, the current system, rooted in legacy EU legislation and domestic amendments, is now seen as outdated, fragmented, and a barrier to innovation. This is particularly prevalent for emerging technologies such as hydrogen, carbon capture, and battery energy storage.

The consultation responds to a number of recommendations in the Corry Review and aligns with the government’s Plan for Change, which seeks to reduce regulatory burdens while maintaining high environmental standards. As such, Defra aims to identify and remove the barriers to growth for the UK’s key industries while maintaining essential environmental and health protections.

Key Reforms

The consultation is structured around five strategic goals:

• Innovation Enablement: proposals include regulatory sandboxes for research and development trials, revised exemptions for testing activities, and enhanced guidance on emerging techniques. By receiving feedback on new models for preserving commercial confidentiality to enable innovation while protecting proprietary data, Defra aims to accelerate the deployment of clean technologies while maintaining environmental safeguards;
• Agile Standards: the EA would take on a more central role in setting Best Available Techniques (known as “BAT”) to support quicker roll-out of established net zero and circular economy technologies. This would be supported by horizontal BAT for cross-sector technologies and mandatory associated environmental performance limits to plug the gaps in standards that create uncertainty, delays and additional cost for business. A consolidated form of regulation would be rolled out across all industry categories (i.e. extended to cover Part B installations, small waste incineration plant, solvent emission activities and medium combustion plant and specified generators) in order to remove the complexities that have been seen to ‘distort markets’ and leave ‘loopholes that allow for pollution’.[2]
• Proportionate Regulation: A tiered permitting system has been proposed, allowing for exemptions or registrations for low-risk activities. This will allow for streamlined regulation for low-risk sectors  (such as backup generators at data centres, small-scale green hydrogen production, and thousands of smaller combustion plant) and adding new regulated activities to provide certainty for developers (including battery energy storage systems, battery manufacturing, non-waste anaerobic digestion and mining of metals and minerals). A modernisation and simplification of the EPR 2016 will essentially seek to clarify, streamline and remove duplication from regulation to speed up permitting.
• Regulatory Efficiency: The EA’s permitting transformation programme will explore staged and flexible approaches to permitting for complex sites / projects in order to provide sufficient certainty for investors. Local authority fee structures are also under review to improve cost recovery, increase the speed of permitting, and create a more automatic and predictable system.
• Transparency and Public Engagement: The UK Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (“PRTR”) will be modernised with proposals to add new high-concern pollutants, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (known as “PFAS” or ‘forever chemicals’). and lower reporting thresholds. These changes would seek to align the UK’s reporting framework and reflect changes in the UK’s emission landscape since the PRTR came into effect in 2007.

Implications for industry

The proposals signal a shift towards a more responsive and risk-based permitting regime that is, in the words of the consultation, ‘not about wholesale deregulation’ but about smarter, more responsive regulation,[3] with the aim of ‘reducing bureaucracy’ and providing greater flexibility while maintaining clarity and predictability to ensure the effective operation of industrial sites. The emphasis on integrated pollution control will allow for more nuanced permitting decisions, especially in environmentally sensitive or capacity-constrained areas such as industrial clusters, and dynamic standard-setting through the reform and implementation of BAT by industry experts will enable regulators to update environmental performance benchmarks more frequently and responsively. However, this agility may also potentially lead to tighter environmental requirements over time as new data, cleaner technologies, and international benchmarks emerge.

For currently unregulated sectors, the consultation offers an opportunity to shape the regulatory framework that will govern their expansion. Likewise, operators of existing installations should prepare for potential permit variations (where environmental standards tighten, or strategic coordination is required) or reclassification (where their activities will no longer require full permitting under a new tiered framework) and should seek to actively engage with the EA to understand how their operations fit within broader environmental planning, particularly in industrial clusters where resource is already constrained.

Next Steps

Following the consultation, Defra will publish a summary of responses and proceed with further consultations on more detailed proposals. Legislative changes will follow via statutory instruments, with continued engagement across devolved governments to ensure UK-wide consistency where appropriate.

Further Information

If you are involved in industrial permitting, clean technology development, or environmental compliance, and would like to discuss the implications of these reforms, please contact a member of our Environment Team.

This article was written by Hal Parkes

[1] Consultation on Modernising Environmental Permitting for Industry (pgs.18-19) 

[2] Ibid (pg. 38)

[3] Ibid (pg. 44)

This consultation sets out a package of reforms to modernise the environmental permitting framework for industry and energy sectors.

https://consult.defra.gov.uk/industrial-emissions-team/consultation-on-modernising-environmental-permitti/consultation/