PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) warns that businesses have less than half the time indicated in a DECC announcement last week to get ready for the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) deadline.

"Registration is a more pressing issue than many businesses think. The final deadline for registration is September 30th but the process needs to start much earlier. Companies need to allow between two and four weeks for the Environment Agency to run checks, including anti-money laundering for company’s senior officers referred to in the process. In reality the deadline is September 2nd for most companies.

"Companies cannot afford to leave registration until the last minute. They need to start moving on the process, and fast, otherwise they face significant fines. Missing the deadline will cost £5,000 and incur an additional charge of £500 per day, up to a maximum of £45,000. There’s also potential reputational damage from a company being listed as non-compliant.”

Delving further into the implications of the government's new 'green tax' for the financial services industry, Robert Mellor, financial services tax leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, said: "Private equity groups are particularly affected as the typical fund structure may cause all of the UK portfolio companies to be collectively brought into the regime. Therefore, even relatively small private equity owned businesses may find themselves unexpectedly caught by the rules."

"For the larger sized financial services firms, the key issue will be energy usage across their property portfolios, especially those with major administrative centres across the UK. Groups will need to assess the impact of the rules across all their UK operations and accessing this data will be a real challenge."

Henry Le Fleming, carbon reporting specialist, PricewaterhouseCoopers, added, "For the property industry a new dynamic is apparent in landlord/tenant negotiations. Neither party is keen to take on responsibility for utilities directly, as this will bring CRC liability, so more sub-metering is likely with landlords trying to push responsibility to tenants to avoid including utilities bills in the rent.”

Analysis by PwC at the launch of the scheme found that companies could be underestimating the impact of the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency regulations, illustrating that the scheme could add up to 6% to energy costs in 2011 depending on the size of a company’s energy bills.

A long term scenario demonstrated that poor performers with an energy bill of £1m could face an additional £500,000 costs on top of their energy bill over the next five years. By 2015, this could equate to around an additional 20% on the energy bill each year.

But companies who plan ahead and perform well could turn an early loss into a gain, seeing their energy costs reduced by over 8% in 2015. For a company with a total energy bill of £1 million, this would be worth just over £85,000 in 2015 alone, or £150,000 over the course of the next five years.

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