Operations & enforcement
What is an enforcement notice?
An enforcement notice requires an operator to remedy a breach of an environmental permit or a waste regulation within a period. Failure to comply is a separate and more serious offence.
Notices are issued by the environmental regulator and are a step on a scale that runs from advice through to prosecution and permit revocation. Receiving one is a signal about where on that scale an operator sits.
What they require is specific and dated, which makes them straightforward to comply with and straightforward to be found in breach of. The evidence of compliance matters as much as the work.
They also form part of an operator's compliance history, which affects how the regulator assesses and charges them subsequently. The consequence outlasts the remedy.
What goes wrong in practice
- Work done to comply with no evidence recorded of what was done or when.
- Root cause never addressed, so the same notice arrives again.
- Compliance history not tracked internally, so the trend is invisible.