The Environment Agency have announced a new batch of audits into ESOS Phase 1, which finished for most people in 2015. Special congratulations to my client “PS” who was notified earlier this week by the EA that they have opened up one of these compliance audits of their ESOS Phase 1 assessment which we did, indeed, complete in 2014 / 2015 for them, ie 4 or 5 years ago.
There are a few problems with this audit, not least of which:
- I know that the staff involved in this audit 5 years ago have all now left the company,
- I’m pretty sure that I’m going to struggle to remember the precise ins and outs of how we approached matters 5 years ago. My memory and our filing systems are good but this is pushing it to its limits.
- The company in question has since merged with a larger company and I’ll bet that the records my client PS had available at the time were not preserved in the move.
The bigger question, though, is what the Environment Agency hope to gain from the exercise. Another of my clients, “BN”, were not happy when we had to revisit one of their audits last year to add 2 company cars to the Total Energy Consumption of their 2015 audit, increasing it by 0.1% but meaning we had to re-run all of the reports for the entire submission as a result. It was a waste of my time, a waste of our client’s money and achieved nothing of significance.
Client PS, the lucky recipient of this new, presumably unwanted, attention is a small charity and as both of the people who read my blogs will already know, I am strongly in favour of smaller charities having an opt-out for ESOS. This decision to audit them will cause them more expense for very little gain is one that should be reversed. When their charitable benefactors donated their hard-earned money to the charity I’m sure that they would far rather it spent on the charities clients than paying us to increase their TEC by 0.1% or whatever else pops out from the audit.
Note: There is a provision in the recent guidance notes allowing for new recipients of ESOS Phase 1 compliance audits to apply for the audit to be transmuted into a compliance audit of ESOS Phase 2. If you are unlucky enough to get summoned for one of these new ESOS Phase 1 compliance audits, drop me a line and we’ll do our best to get this swapped over to ESOS Phase 2 for you.
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Enistic help companies manage their energy and have been doing so since 2009. We are market leaders in ESOS auditing, energy monitoring via meters of all forms and we carried out over 2,000 ESOS site audits during ESOS phase 1. We develop and maintain Plato, a cloud-based Energy Management Platform that helps a large number of medium-sized and Enterprise level organisations manage their energy in real-time throughout the world, including several listed companies. We are based in Oxford but have distributors worldwide and have national reach when it comes to ESOS Audits.
If you would like more information about ESOS and see our Top 5 Tips On How to Make The Most Out Of ESOS, click here to download our guide.
Want some help? Speak to Darryl Mattocks
Darryl is the founder of Enistic and has personally been the responsible ESOS Lead Assessor on over 250 ESOS Audits. He advises on how to reduce energy use in over 2,000 sites throughout the UK and is doubly certified for ESOS by two independent ESOS approval bodies. He is an approved ISO50001 Lead Auditor and holds the industry-specific CEM and CMVP qualifications awarded by the Association of Energy Engineers.
He is happy to answer any ESOS, SECR or energy management related questions you may have and can be contacted by email at darryl@wordpress-1115181-4362448.cloudwaysapps.com or by phone on 01865 598 776.