Detailed guide: Managing your climate change agreement (CCA)

CCA register

Your sector association manages your account on the CCA register and will make any changes needed to your details.

Your responsible person or administrative contact can ask for 2 people to have read-only access to your account information on the CCA register. One of these must already be named on your account; the other could be a nominated consultant.

Log on to the CCA register for sector associations.

CCA: changes to your account, organisation or operations

You can change the address details for your administrative contact by asking your sector association to make the change.

For other types of changes, the Environment Agency will need to amend your agreement and issue you with a new one. This is called making a variation.

You need a variation when:

• an operator takes over a facility from another operator, or buys target units from another operator
• the operator or facility name has changed, or the operator address has changed
• there has been a structural change or a change to the extent of the eligible facility
• errors have been discovered in the base year data used to set the target

You must tell your sector association immediately if any changes to your operations or organisation will result in a variation to your agreement. Under the terms of your agreement, they need to notify the Environment Agency within 20 working days of the change.

This page only provides a summary of the types of changes to your operations that would affect your CCA. Download the CCA operations manual for more guidance.

CCA reporting timetable

You must submit a report at the end of each target period.

Target period ends	Deadline for submitting data
31 December 2014	1 May 2015
31 December 2016	1 May 2017
31 December 2018	1 May 2019
31 December 2020	1 May 2021

CCA data to report

You must report specified data at the end of each target period, including either the:

• energy use for your target unit
• total number of units of carbon emitted by your target unit

What you report depends on whether your target unit holds a carbon target or an energy target.

The CCA operations manual shows how to calculate energy use, carbon emissions and performance against your target.

CCA: target not met or exceeded

If your target unit does not meet its target at the end of the target period you may pay a buy-out fee to make good your underperformance. This will allow your facilities to remain with the CCA scheme and continue to receive the climate change levy (CCL) discount in the next certification period.

The buy-out fee is £14 per tonne of CO2 (equivalent) emitted over your target. For example, exceeding your target by 1,000 tonnes of CO2 (equivalent) would mean a buy-out fee of £14,000.

For target period 1 (2013 and 2014) and target period 2 (2015 and 2016) the rate was £12 per tonne of CO2 (equivalent).

If you need to pay a buy-out fee, we will send you a notice with details of:

• how much to pay
• when you need to pay
• how to pay
• what will happen if you do not pay

If you do not pay the buy-out fee by the deadline, we will issue you a decertification notice. Your target unit facilities will be decertified from the CCA scheme and you will not be eligible to claim the CCL discount.

If your emissions are lower than your target, the surplus will be converted into equivalent tonnes of CO2 and recorded in the CCA register. This surplus will be used at the end of future reporting periods in case you do not meet your targets.

CCA report submission

You need to send your reporting data to your sector association. It will enter your data onto the CCA register and submit this to the Environment Agency. Further information on reporting is available in the CCA operations manual.

CCA: financial penalties

The Environment Agency may issue financial penalties to an operator that:

• fails to report by 1 May following the end of the target period
• fails to provide any further information the Environment Agency has requested by the deadline set
• provides inaccurate information
• does not tell them about any changes to their operations that would affect its CCA

The process we use when considering imposing a financial penalty is explained in annex 2, section F of the Enforcement and Sanctions policy.

Where we consider it may be appropriate to impose a penalty, we will serve a notice of intent giving the person an opportunity to make representations about the penalty within a reasonable time (normally 28 calendar days). We will take account of any representations received in response to that notice before making our final decision. Where we impose a penalty, we will provide a summary of our reasons and notify the person of their right to appeal.

If we decide to impose a financial penalty on a target unit we will issue a notice to the operator, setting out:

• the amount of the penalty
• the reason for the penalty
• what steps need to be taken to remedy the matter that has led to the penalty (and a deadline for doing this)
• how to pay the penalty

If the operator does not pay by the deadline, or fails to make expected progress to remedy the matter that led to the penalty, the Environment Agency may terminate the agreement.

We publish a summary of the penalties imposed on data.gov.uk.

CCA audits

The Environment Agency will carry out audits each year on selected target unit operators and sector associations, to verify eligibility and performance.

We will select facilities for audit either on a risk based approach, or by random selection to ensure there is a representative sample.

We will send an email to the administrative contact for those operators selected for audit. The auditor will contact the operator to agree the date of the audit.

There are 2 types of audit:

Full site audit

We will ask the operator to supply data in advance. The auditor will then visit the site to examine the data and facility in greater detail.

Desktop audit

We will ask the operator to supply data by an agreed date. The auditor will review this remotely and call representatives from the target unit on an agreed date. These audits are light touch and take only a few hours on the agreed date.

CCA further guidance

The information on this page is only a summary of how to manage a CCA. For more help you can:

• download the CCA operations manual
• email cca-help@environment-agency.gov.uk
• telephone: 03708 506 506
• write to:

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