The Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) has confirmed that the compliance fee will be introduced as an alternative form of compliance for WEEE compliance schemes to meet their 2014 WEEE recycling obligations.Three proposals were put forward to BIS by potential operators of the compliance fee in October 2014. It has been confirmed that the winning bid was that submitted by the Joint Trade Association(JTA). This proposal involves a sliding scale which will require schemes to pay more to meet compliance the further away they are from their scheme obligation target.
Whilst B2B Compliance has been able to meet 2014 obligation by securing sufficient evidence throughout 2014, this announcement may come to some relief of schemes who have fallen short. If BIS had decided not to approve the operation of the compliance fee these schemes would have been in breach of the regulations and would have risked prosecution for non-compliance.
Whilst not condemning the use of the compliance fee as an alternative form of compliance, by securing evidence throughout 2014 B2B Compliance are certain of end of year evidence costs for our B2C Producer members.
For those other schemes, until compliance fee calculations are finalised in the coming months, they will be unable to close off evidence costs for their members until much later on in 2015.