Consultation on our Regulatory Fees and Charges for 2022 onwards.

Overview

Natural Resources Wales’ purpose is to ensure that our natural resources and environment are sustainably maintained, enhanced and used in a way that is good for people, good for the environment and good for the economy. 

Our remit is wide and includes providing a range of regulatory services.  We are required by Government to recover the costs of these regulatory services from those we regulate, rather than through general taxation. The fees and charges raised to cover regulatory costs account for approximately 18% of Natural Resources Wales total 2021/22 funding of £220m.

We currently review our Fees and Charges Schemes on an annual basis to ensure we recover our costs and meet any technical requirements. We also review the way we work, ensuring our processes are efficient and effective, to keep charges as low as possible. 

When setting fees and charges, we follow the requirements set out in ‘Managing Welsh Public Money ensuring that only eligible costs are included within calculations. Our current charging schemes are available on our website.

We regularly meet and discuss our proposals with the Charge Payers Consultative Group, consisting of various stakeholders from trade and representative organisations. This helps us to develop our charging strategy and schemes for the future. We would like to thank those in the group for their commitment in representing their members’ views and continuing to work with us in this way, now and in the future. We annually review the membership of this group to make sure we have members relevant to the changes proposed.  A list of current membership is attached in Annex 1.

As well as following our regulatory principle, the Regulators’ Code and Managing Welsh Public Money, we are committed to the following charging principles;

• transparency of our charging decisions
• avoidance of cross subsidy between regimes
• providing longer term planning horizons wherever possible
• avoiding cycles of cutting then raising charges by actively managing our surpluses and deficits
• keeping charges as low as possible through a continued drive for increased efficiency

We continue to monitor the impact on our charges following the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) now and in the future, especially in areas where our regulation is determined or influenced by EU legislation.