25 years of NetRegs - a look back on our story

The late 1990s was a great time of change in the way the environment was being protected in the UK.  A new Environment Agency (EA) for England and Wales had only just been formed, in 1996, merging the National Rivers Authority (NRA), HMIP and 81 Waste Regulatory Authorities into one organisation.  A new wave of political thinking was sweeping the UK following the election of a Labour Government in May 1997; and the UK was at last losing its “Dirty man of Europe” title, as successive waves of European Legislation had seen sweeping improvements to air and water quality across the country.

Soon after, the EA set up the Environmental Protection National Service (EPNS), a national team, to champion the issues of: modernising environmental legislation, improving technical guidance for regulated industries, and supporting waste minimisation and pollution prevention activities across the bulk of non-regulated industries. I was appointed to lead the EPNS team after 14 years in business as a senior manager working for British Petroleum, Gulf Oil and Chevron.   Tim Fanshawe joined me in the pollution prevention team under Martyn Cheesbrough, as the EA’s first Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Adviser, from his previous role in the NRA.  At the same time the EA saw a progressive leadership team, appointed with Sir John Harmon as the Chair of the Board in January 2000, and  Baroness Young as the Chief Executive Officer in December 2000.

 

 

Tim’s work quickly established that SMEs, which make up the bulk of UK business, were mostly flying under the radar, because they did not require permits or licences. And early surveys of businesses across the UK showed that they had very poor environmental awareness. Many business owners relied on relatives and friends for advice, rather than on informed professionals.  He also made clear that the 4.3 million SMEs made up 99% of businesses in the UK, generated 60% of all commercial waste, and caused 80% of pollution incidents in England and Wales.  If you wanted to improve the environment, SMEs were an important missing component in the work of the EA.

Fortunately, there were many initiatives inside and outside the new government which addressed waste and pollution. “SMEs” was a buzz-word that got access to a huge variety of groups, organisations and events; and Tim went to everything he could, especially if it meant talking directly to businesses and their representative trade organisations. 

There was a very loud, clear and consistent message emerging, with businesses from all sectors saying the same thing: “tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, but it’s impossible to find out what I am supposed to do.” An idea was forming, and a lucky meeting kickstarted the whole process of developing what would become NetRegs.

An Environment Agency Board Member requested a meeting to discuss SMEs:

• could Tim develop his ideas of providing a new and simple framework for a sector-based internet guidance and advice tool, turning them into a working prototype.
• this would be presented at the final conference of the three-year pan-European ENRIL Project (European Network for Research Industry Links).

The challenge was to do this for one business sector, in less than three months.   Agreement was reached, and Tim pulled it off, for the lithographic printing sector.  He was able to demonstrate a fully working pilot version, called NetRegs,  at the final conference of the ENRIL Project. The approach received enthusiastic support.

 

 

The EPNS team were now able to use the NetRegs pilot to promote the idea of a full NetRregs service across multiple industry sectors. To do so would require dedicated staff and a funding stream.  The Department of Trade and Industry (DTi) initially agreed to fund 50% of the costs to develop guidelines for up to 10 sectors, and three trade bodies said they were happy to contribute the rest of the funds for their sectors. However, realistically, it was going to take up to 20 years to replicate the pilot version for another 100 sectors.  

This was a time, however, when the new Chair of the Environment Agency produced a fresh vision for the EA. Launched in January 2001, the core document “An Environment Vision – the Environment Agency’s contribution to sustainable development” laid out a wider remit for the EA with fundamental goals of a better quality of life for all and an enhanced environment for wildlife.  The key outcomes envisaged were: cleaner air; improved and protected inland and coastal waters; and restored, protected land with healthier soils. Key changes needed were: a greener business world; and wiser, sustainable use of natural resources. The Vision also outlined that such an approach would help manage; limiting and adapting to climate change; and reducing flood risk. Such a vision meant the EA going well beyond its regulatory permitting activity.

NetRegs was a perfect fit for the aspirations in this document and received management support from Barbara Young and John Harmon for a bid for funding from the Treasury Capital Modernisation Fund (CMF). £3.5m were secured for a 3-year project to develop guidelines for 100 business sectors, and NetRegs was officially launched UK-wide, with the support of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and the Environment and Heritage Service Northern Ireland (EHSNI) on 19th October 2001.

A full-time NetRegs team was recruited by the EA, led by Richard Martin, along with dedicated team members in SEPA and NIEA and work started.  Yes, there were various administrative and logistical complications, but the pros of working with a dedicated group of folk from 3 different regulators was clear.  Working as one team to deliver a UK-wide service that the business customer was genuinely eager to get their hands on was a truly uplifting experience. The hardest job was trying to convince policy and legal teams to adopt a new approach to drafting guidelines.  We were fortunate, however, to have the full support of Ric Navarro, the Director of the EA’s legal team, to support efforts to meet the demanding project timetable.   We were producing full guidelines for each sector in about 3 months. This included our sector coordinators liaising with relevant trade bodies, producing an initial draft, getting input from both policy and legal staff, redrafting and then publishing, at which point our communications team would launch the guidelines for the sector, often with large events. It was fast paced, exciting and we delivered the whole thing to time and budget, which for an IT project, breaking boundaries with everything we did, was a bit novel.

 

 

Customer perspective – the win-win-win-win!

What was the reaction from business?  Small businesses and trade organisations were positive and receptive from the start – they could instantly see the potential benefits of the NetRegs service. Even consultants, who were initially worried we were taking away their work, realised our efforts to improve the consistency of legal compliance guidance meant that their clients (the SMEs) were better informed, which meant the consultant could focus more on helping small businesses deliver specific on-site improvements, rather than trying to interpret environmental legislation.

The NetRegs team’s engagement with trade bodies during the drafting of the guidelines meant that we had a product that the trade organisations were happy to push to their members when the guidelines were completed.  After all, this was the EA, NIEA and SEPA telling business what the legislation meant for their sector. This boosted take up of the overall service, which in turn generated interest from trade magazines (who were happy to write editorials for most of our sector launch events), which again generated a wider outreach and awareness.

In addition to trade bodies, we also established regular dialogue with some of the larger corporates, in sectors like construction, and persuaded them to spread awareness of NetRegs through their supply chains, to thousands of businesses - a virtuous circle of wins.

The Government and wider EU view

Officials within government, especially DTI and the Small Business Service (Executive Agency 2000-2007) were enormously supportive. Tim was invited to join a Government trade delegation to Beijing to demonstrate NetRegs to 2,000 Chinese business leaders! Closer to home, delegations from various countries asked to meet the team when they visited the Environment Agency, and Tim made several trips to show NetRegs to other interested European Environmental Regulators.  

Following completion of the CMF funding in 2004 (the first phase of NetRegs), the partners (EA in England and Wales, EHSNI in Northern Ireland and SEPA in Scotland) regrouped and put in place a programme to update and market the service to SMEs and their advisors. Operational arrangements were laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding which ran  for the next four years till 2008.  Work programmes and budgets of circa £1m per annum were agreed each year.  The Welsh Assembly Government and the Small Business Service (SBS) also funded the site.  NetRegs linked to the Businesslink.gov Internet portal for SMEs, and provided the model relationship the SBS were looking for with other regulators.

Simple advice to SMEs and their advisors was now available across the UK on the Internet, 24 hrs a day.  Advice was free, and business users were not identified unless they choose to register. It linked with other advisory services in the UK, and ensured businesses that required follow up work were directed to Government funded programmes.  It had a separate identity and trade name that were the joint property of the partners, as were the intellectual property rights (IPR).  Trade name, domain names and company name were all protected. Crucially the IPR rights were held equally by all the partners, and the MOU was designed such that if any partner withdrew the entire investment would fall to the remaining partners.

The site had grown and was recognised as best practice by the European Union, the Parliamentary Environment Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) select committee and the Hampton Review. Usage of the site was growing, closely linked to marketing effort.  SMEs were being encouraged to seek environmental advice through marketing pressure from their supply chains, banks or insurance companies or because they had encountered a regulatory problem, and NetRegs was there to support them.  And users took positive action: 61% responding to an on-line survey in 2005 confirming that they had done so as a result of using NetRegs. 

For the first time regulators were reaching a large and growing number of the 4.3 million SME’s, critical businesses to the UK economy.  Sector by sector they got the advice they needed in a language they could understand. The EA, EHSNI and SEPA were delivering on its vision for the environment in reaching out to a group of businesses it did not directly regulate and was influencing their behaviour to improve the environment. 

As the reputation and value of NetRegs continued to grow, both the UK Government and the European Union offered an injection of further funding to strengthen the programme and allow additional sectors to be added and new services for SMEs to be designed. NetRegs was flying and continuing to grow, running counter-culture, at a time when budgets for the Environment Agencies were tightening.  The Business Resource Efficiency and Waste (BREW) programme pumped in further cash in 2006-7 and by 2009 investment in the programme had reached nearly £7million.  

The European Union had also identified the need to support SMEs and identified NetRegs as best regulatory practice, and Tim was an active member of the Directorate-General XI Compliance Assistance Programme, which ultimately lead to the development of a successful EU LIFE+ bid to extend the NetRegs service.  The EU Life Bid to the LIFE programme was worth £4.3m and was planned to be spent over the following 3 year period from 2010 - 2013 to further expand the NetRegs Service, and discussions had started on how the service could be franchised across the EU to give SMEs a real advantage to trade across the common EU Market.  But storm clouds were gathering.

By 2009 NetRegs was clearly seen as best European practise to support environmental compliance amongst SMEs.  £4.3 million was on the table from the EU LIFE Programme to fund its further expansion, but winds of change were starting to affect NetRegs.  The government abolished the Small Business Service as a stand-alone Executive Agency in 2007, Baroness Barbara Young and Sir John Harmon stood down as CEO and Chair of the EA in 2008, and the UK Government changed in May 2010.  Work to centralise all England and Wales Government advice to Business through the Business.Gov platform was underway, run by Central Government, with support from the Executive Agencies.  Funding for the EA was under pressure and the EU Offer of funding for the NetRegs programme was declined due to difficulties in finding the match funding.  This, despite the fact that an independent evaluation in 2008 estimated the benefit to SMEs of using NetRegs to be £58 million per year (from Eftec Economic Evaluation of the Benefits of NetRegs to SMEs in the UK, April 2008). The cost benefit analysis for maintaining NetRegs as a UK wide service was rock solid.

A case was made by Business and the EA to maintain NetRegs as a separate sector-based UK wide guidance service for SMEs through 2007-2010, but the argument was eventually lost in England and Wales. SMEs in England and Wales would find guidance and advice on environmental legislation via the Business.Gov website and the sector-specific approach so beloved by SMEs was swept away.

The devolved administrations in Northern Ireland and Scotland and Northern Ireland, however, had other ideas. The Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) and SEPA invoked the clauses in the MOU that allowed them to take ownership of the IPR for NetRegs, to re-launch it in 2012, as a unique service to SMEs in Northern Ireland and Scotland. The site today stands as a testament to the vision of the NIEA in Northern Ireland and SEPA in Scotland, and SMEs in both countries are the better for it.

Where next for NetRegs? Clearly the service is thriving in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Are we once again seeing a change of attitude in the UK Government and a recognition of the importance of supporting SMEs to understand environmental regulation and the challenges they now face in dealing with climate change?  Has the time come to re-visit what many would see as the missteps in 2010, and find a way to extend NetRegs to cover England and Wales once again and potentially Ireland as well? As the market for SMEs became more difficult in recent years, should we be seeking to make life as easy as possible for SMEs to comply with environmental legislation at the least cost? NetRegs is a tool that clearly does just that.

Will logic apply and will a UK wide service emerge again? Both Tim and I hope so.