F-Gas enforcement: who checks, and what non-compliance costs

Who enforces it

In England, the Environment Agency is the enforcing authority for the F-Gas regime. Other parts of the UK have their own arrangements, and local authorities have roles in some respects.

The regulator has a range of sanctions available, including civil penalties, and the amounts are set out in the enforcement regime. Rather than quote figures that change, the useful point is the shape of it: penalties are tiered by the seriousness of the breach and by whether it is a first occurrence, and they are applied to the operator.

For the current penalty position, the gov.uk guidance and the Environment Agency’s own published enforcement material are the authoritative sources.

How non-compliance is actually discovered

1. Building sale or purchase. Due diligence asks for plant records. Their absence is a finding, a negotiating point, and occasionally a retention on the purchase price.
2. Lease negotiations and dilapidations. Plant condition and compliance records come up at lease end.
3. Insurance review, particularly after a claim involving plant.
4. A new maintenance contractor carrying out an asset survey and finding systems that have never been checked. This is the most common route by some distance.
5. A refrigerant supplier query, where unusual quantities are being purchased for a site.
6. An internal audit, in larger organisations with compliance functions.
7. A tenant or occupier raising it, where responsibility is ambiguous.
8. An incident – a significant leak, or plant failure with consequences.

Notice that most of these are commercial rather than regulatory, and most arrive at a moment when you least want a compliance gap – mid-transaction, mid-claim, or at the start of a new contractor relationship.

What non-compliance actually costs

The refrigerant loss point is worth dwelling on. A chronically leaking system loses refrigerant continuously, and somebody pays for the top-ups. On a large system using a high-GWP refrigerant, that is a substantial recurring cost being absorbed as routine maintenance when it is actually a fault that should have been fixed.

The commercial case, without the regulation

Even setting the legal obligation aside entirely, the F-Gas regime largely describes good asset management.

• Knowing what plant you have, its age, its condition and its refrigerant, is basic estate management and most sites cannot produce it.
• Finding leaks early means a repair rather than a failure, and preserves an expensive refrigerant charge.
• Records show which plant leaks chronically, which is exactly the information you need to decide what to replace.
• Planned replacement is cheaper than reactive replacement, and the records are what make planning possible.
• A compliant, documented estate is worth more in a transaction than an undocumented one.
• Contractor accountability improves when there is a record of what was found and what was done.

Put differently: an operator doing this properly for commercial reasons alone would end up doing most of what the regulations require.

If you discover a gap

1. Establish the actual positionSurvey every system, record type and charge, calculate CO2e, and determine what should have been happening.
2. Do not fabricate historyCreating records for checks that did not happen would be considerably worse than acknowledging the gap, in every respect including legally.
3. Note honestly when records beginA logbook that starts today with a clear statement is a defensible position. A fabricated history is not.
4. Start the schedule immediatelyThe distinction between a site that is compliant going forward and one that still is not is the distinction that matters.
5. Check every system for leaks nowA site that has never been checked may have a chronically leaking system nobody has noticed.
6. Fix what needs fixingLeaks repaired, leak detection fitted where required, labelling applied.
7. Put it in the management systemSo it does not lapse again when somebody leaves.

Regulators generally respond considerably better to an operator who has identified a problem and put a competent regime in place than to one who has not – and in a commercial context, being able to say ‘we found this, here is what we did’ is a far stronger position than being asked and having nothing.

Questions worth asking internally

• Who in this organisation knows we have F-Gas obligations? If the answer is nobody, that is the finding.
• Do we have an asset register with refrigerant types and charges?
• Do we hold our own records, or does our contractor?
• When was each system last leak checked, and is the frequency correct?
• Have we verified our contractor’s company certification, not just their engineers’?
• Is anything on our site not on the maintenance schedule? Cellar cooling, display refrigeration and comms room units are the usual omissions.
• What happens when the person who currently handles this leaves?

That last question is the one that determines whether compliance survives. A regime that depends on one person’s memory is a regime with an expiry date.