The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has launched a consultation on setting a compliance fee under the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Regulations for 2025. The consultation, which opened yesterday (13 October) and closes on 10 November, invites views on whether to implement a compliance fee and seeks feedback on a proposal received for managing the fee.

The compliance fee mechanism provides an alternative approach for producer compliance schemes (PCS) that fail to meet their annual collection targets. Under the WEEE Regulations 2013, PCSs are assigned collection targets based on the amount of electrical and electronic equipment their members placed on the UK market in the previous year. When schemes cannot obtain sufficient evidence notes from approved authorised treatment facilities (AATFs) to meet these targets, they can pay a compliance fee instead.

The use of a compliance fee and how it is managed is agreed yearly, with the Secretary of State holding discretionary powers to approve a methodology as an alternative form of compliance. Funds collected through the compliance fee mechanism are subsequently used to support WEEE collection, recycling and reuse initiatives.

The consultation includes a proposal from the Joint Trade Association, a collective of trade associations from the domestic appliance, battery and electrical industries, supported by economic analysis from FTI Consulting.

What the consultation asks

Respondents are being asked two key questions: whether the Secretary of State should set a compliance fee for 2025, and how well the submitted proposal meets the Government's published evaluation criteria.

Defra will assess the proposal against six areas including the methodology for calculating the fee, how funds would be dispersed, administration arrangements, implementation timeline, the proposer's experience, and IT systems.

Key considerations include whether this kind of approach will encourage PCS’s to meet targets through actual collection rather than payment, as well as whether fees reflect the true costs for managing the WEEE streams, and how commercial confidentiality would be maintained whilst ensuring transparency.

The consultation is aimed at producers of electrical and electronic equipment, approved producer compliance schemes, WEEE treatment facilities, waste management companies, electrical reuse organisations and local authorities.

Defra plans to announce its decision by the end of January 2026, allowing schemes time to pay any compliance fees before the 31 March 2026 deadline for submitting their Declaration of Compliance.

The Joint Trade Association proposes continuing the methodology used in recent years, which it describes as its "business as usual" approach. The methodology calculates stream-specific fees based on the weighted average net cost per tonne of direct WEEE collections from local authority designated collection facilities, with escalators applied depending on whether national collections fall below or exceed targets.