Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 16
74th Report - Environmental regulation
Published 25 Mar 2026
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Environmental regulation All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
The Environment Agency told us it had a large legacy IT problem in 2020, with 700 IT systems in total. It told us it had modernised its systems and closed down 350 applications. It had also improved the transparency of its information by publishing all its reports on water quality. However, it acknowledged it has issues still to address, for example replicating this transparency in other sectors such as waste.39 Natural England has received limited funding for digital transformation of its core regulatory services in recent years.40 It told us it hopes future investment will allow it to mirror the digital improvements at the Environment Agency. It plans to invest in customer-facing regulatory systems which are more user-friendly and should speed up processing times, and to make use of AI when handling data.41
From: Public Accounts Committee, 74th Report - Environmental regulation (HC 1687), 25 March 2026
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 1 June 2026 (deadline 25 May 2026).