Corporate report

Environment Agency customer service commitment

Updated 18 March 2024

Applies to England

1. Environment Agency customer commitment

What you can expect from the Environment Agency

They will:

• provide an efficient and high quality service
• be helpful, polite and respectful
• make it easy for you to do business with them

Their promise

You can trust the Environment Agency to:

• make it easy for you to contact them
• understand and meet your needs
• listen to your feedback and tell you what they have done

What they expect from you

The Environment Agency want you to:

• contact them if you are unhappy and want to complain
• respect their staff – they won’t tolerate threatening, abusive or violent behaviour
• tell them what you think about their service so they can improve

2. What the Environment Agency does

They work to create better places for people and wildlife, and support sustainable development. The Environment Agency is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

3. Contacting the Environment Agency

The Environment Agency wants to make it easy for you to contact them. You can do this by email, post, telephone, online or through social media.

Please let them know if you:

• need to talk to someone and English is not your first language
• have a hearing impairment
• require a large print format or Braille

They have access to services that can help.

Contact the Environment Agency

4. What you can expect from the Environment Agency

They:

• offer a professional service to everyone they work with
• are committed to improving the service you receive

They aim to:

• get it right first time and on time – provide an efficient and high quality service
• provide the right information – make the information clear and accessible
• work professionally – their staff will always be professional
• have a good attitude – they will listen to your ideas
• get the right results – make sure they give you what you need

5. Environment Agency service standards

They want to give you the best service they can. Their service standards tell you how long it will take them to respond.

They aim to:

• acknowledge your general enquiry or complaint within 3 working days where possible and tell you when you will receive a response - the timing of which will depend on the complexity of the enquiry or complaint
• reply to Freedom of Information and Environment Information Regulation requests within 20 working days
• issue flood warnings as early as possible and within the published timescales
• respond to major incidents as quickly as possible and within the published timescales
• process permits as quickly as possible and within the statutory timescales

Sometimes we may need longer to respond, for example if:

• there is an incident
• you are asking for complex information
• we need to involve a third party

If we are unable to respond within these timescales we will let you know.

You can also find out more about their services, standards and charters on these pages:

• Boating - registering your boat
• Environmental permitting - making an application
• Farming and land management - find out more
• Fishing - buying a licence
• Flooding - being prepared
• Freedom of information (FOI) request
• Personal information charter
• River Medway: customer charter
• Harbour of Rye: customer charter
• River Thames: customer charter

6. Responding to environmental incidents

For environmental incidents the Environment Agency:

• need to prioritise their activities on incidents that cause serious and significant risk
• are unable to respond to every environmental incident reported to them
• may in some cases, after assessing the risk, decide that no further action will be taken
• will use the information provided to build a picture of environmental threats - to enable targeted compliance, regulation and enforcement
• will continue to regulate activities with an environmental permit so they can prevent damage to the environment
• will not provide feedback to individual reports of environmental incidents

Deciding what action to take

The information you provide to the Environment Agency’s advisors is logged onto their system. They combine this incident information with other data. This helps them to assess how serious the incident could be. Some of the factors that determine how they manage the incident are:

• scale of the harm to the environment or people
• duration
• number of times it has occurred

Other ways to report environmental incidents

If you know the source of the pollution then you may want to inform those responsible. They can then take action to stop it. Regulated sites should have procedures for dealing with these reports, for example a water company.

If the incident you have reported to us worsens or continues for several days, call the Environment Agency again on 0800 80 70 60.

7. Complaints, commendations and appeals

The Environment Agency want you to tell them what you think so they can understand more about what’s important to you and how you want to work with them. If they do not get it right they want you to tell them how they could do better.

See their complaints procedure.

8. What they expect from you

Environment Agency staff will be professional and fair when they deal with you. In return they ask you to respect their staff. They will not tolerate threatening, abusive or violent behaviour.

Under these circumstances no member of staff should be required to or feel obliged to deal with any customer either face to face, over the phone or in correspondence. A member of staff has the right to refuse to serve the customer and will arrange to refer them to their immediate manager.

The Environment Agency position statement on ‘Managing unacceptable customer behaviour’ helps staff manage these situations and provides information to customers on the steps they may take.