Risk-based regulation improves the Agency’s effectiveness by establishing priorities and targeting more of our regulatory effort at higher-risk issues. It will also help us to reduce overall environmental risks and to understand the causes of risks better.

A key component of risk-based regulation is ‘Operator and Pollution Risk Appraisal’ (OPRA). This is an Agency tool for assessing the environmental risks of sites we regulate and the competence of site operators.

We currently operate OPRA schemes for industrial processes regulated under the system of Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) and for waste management facilities. We also use ‘Operator Monitoring Assessment’ (OMA) for auditing the quality of self-monitoring undertaken by the operators of processes.

Agency field officers apply OPRA to regulated activities and generate numerical scores. These can be used for setting the level of compliance inspections. Follow the links to view our most recent OPRA scores for both IPC processes and waste management facilities.

We are also developing a common OPRA methodology for all our Environmental Protection (EP) activities. EP OPRA builds on the existing IPC and waste schemes and will eventually replace them. We will publish EP OPRA scores once the methodology is fully operational.

Further information on risk-based regulation, and wider environmental risk-assessment issues, is available from the Agency’s National Centre for Risk Analysis & Options Appraisal (NCRAOA).