What is a pollution incident?
A pollution incident is any discharge to land, air or water that could cause environmental damage.
Examples of pollution incidents include:
- fuel drips during refuelling
- leaking plant or equipment
- leaks from fuel or chemical containers
- contaminated water entering a watercourse or drain
- wind blown dust and waste
- operational failures of pumps and pipelines
- failures of treatment plant.
What is a pollution incident response plan?
A pollution incident response plan is a short document that outlines the actions your business could take to minimise the pollution caused by an incident. It is also known as a 'spillage response plan'.
Why do you need one?
It is not a legal requirement for most businesses to have a pollution incident response plan. However, if your business causes pollution you could be committing a criminal offence and might be liable to pay compensation. A plan will help you prevent a pollution incident occurring at your site.
You will have to have a plan if your business requires an environmental permit (England and Wales), a pollution prevention and control (PPC) permit (Northern Ireland and Scotland) or is regulated by the Control of Major Accident Hazards (COMAH) Regulations.
Control of major accident hazards (COMAH)
Environmental permits
Pollution Prevention and Control permits
What information should your plan contain?
Details of your business
- The name of your business.
- The address or location of your premises or site.
- A list of the operations that take place on your premises.
- Location plan (eg an Ordnance Survey map) showing the proximity of your site to surface watercourses.
Key staff and contacts details
- Names and contact telephone numbers for staff who are responsible for making decisions and taking action in the event of a spill or leak.
- The name of the senior responsible person.
- Contact telephone numbers for the emergency services, your environmental regulator and the pollution hotline (0800 80 70 60).
- Contact numbers for your water company (water authority in Scotland) where pollution could contaminate drinking water.
- Contact numbers for the sewerage undertaker in case pollutants enter foul drainage.
- The name of the person responsible for keeping the plan up-to-date.
Contact your environmental regulator
Document review dates
- The date that the plan was last reviewed. You need to make sure that it is current and up-to-date.
- The date your workforce was last briefed on the contents of the plan.
Details of pollution risks at your premises or site
Have a site plan that shows areas that are vulnerable to pollution, including the locations of car parks, delivery and storage areas, excavations, and any other areas that could give rise to pollution, and locations of surface watercourses or culverts where pollution may travel to.
List the types of fuel, oils, gases and chemicals stored on your site. Estimates of how much of each of these is normally kept on-site will also help the emergency services in the event of an incident.
Once you have identified these possible sources of pollution, you can take action to reduce the likelihood of an incident.
Water pollution
Environment Agency: Pollution Prevention Pays - Getting your Site Right
How to deal with incidents
Your plan should describe the actions to take in the event of an incident and who is responsible for taking them. The actions that you need to take will depend on your specific business activities.
For example, the plan should contain details of how to:
- stop incidents occurring in the first place, eg prevent leaks
- contain incidents, eg use spill kits to prevent spilled materials entering drains or watercourses
- notify the relevant contacts when an incident occurs, eg key staff, environmental regulators and emergency services
- decide whether an incident is significant or not
- clean up after any incident, eg how you are going to store and dispose of contaminated materials.
