Regular readers of my articles will know that one of the beefs I have with the tide of legislation coming out of Europe is that no one seems to give enough thought to enforcement.

Laws designed with the fine motives of reducing emissions, reducing energy, etc., are all well and good, but if nothing is done to police them, then they will fall short of their aims. In the U.K., certainly, there is a feeling from within the cooling industry that the regulators must make an example of those who willfully flout the law on matters such as F-Gas.

If not, it will be even more difficult to bring the rest of the industry on board, or to convince customers who are currently ignorant of the requirements — especially when there is a reasonable degree of investment involved, such as in new leak-detection regimes or record-keeping. And the more the rules are seen as "avoidable," the more they will fail in their environmental aims, the ultimate one of which is to protect our atmosphere.

In the U.K., government regulators like to talk about "light-touch regulation," but many think this is simply a way to defend not spending money on an inspection and enforcement regime. There is a growing sense that, for the current government at least, environmental regulation does not provide sufficient cost-benefit (or perhaps political capital) to justify stricter enforcement.

Naturally, many inside and outside the cooling industry retort: "Isn't saving the planet worth spending money on?" Upon reaching office in 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron proclaimed that he wanted the coalition government to be "the greenest government ever," so there is a grim irony here.

Although health and safety has always benefited from an enforcement regime that is stricter than most of Europe, there is plenty of evidence that the same doesn't apply to green regulation, unfortunately.

We have already been down this road too many times. The Energy Performance in Buildings Directive, designed to drive energy reduction through grading both domestic and commercial buildings' energy performance, is a good example.

The majority of building owners have tended to comply with the basic requirement of calling in an assessor to produce an energy performance certificate. But a woefully low proportion have complied with the requirement to have an air conditioning inspection, which is mandatory for all properties with systems over 12 kW.

Compliance is generally estimated to be around 5 percent with this requirement, and that is largely down to the fact that it is not enforced by the regulators. Even a high-profile campaign by national consultants body Cibse did nothing to change the government's mind.

And so we come again to the new F-Gas Regulation, which became law in Europe on Jan. 1. Since the first iteration of F-Gas came out six years ago, there has been a clear sense that the sheer bureaucracy involved with investigating things like record keeping, refrigerant tracking and leak inspection would ensure it remained a low enforcement priority.

The fact that the U.K. government released a consultation document just before Christmas, calling for industry input into how the rules should be implemented, was greeted with cautious optimism. Indeed, some of the proposals it outlined looked surprisingly (and encouragingly) tough.

Among the regulatory powers proposed were:

• Powers for customs officers to impound unlawfully imported material;
• Appointment of enforcement bodies such as the Environment Agency, devolved equivalents and local authorities with powers of entry to examine records, take samples and seize equipment;
• Powers for the enforcement bodies to issue compliance notices for failure to comply with requirements of the EU Regulation.

The idea of enforcement bodies having the powers to seize equipment is certainly a new concept to the cooling industry in the U.K., but alas the consultation document had further revelations to temper it. The first of these was that inspectors' powers would only apply between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., and that a maximum of four people could attend, if they had a court warrant. Thus there looks unlikely to be any late-night "illicit refrigerant busts" in the U.K.

And there were further shattered illusions later in the document, with the revelation that just two Environment Agency inspectors have been allocated to the entire inspection and enforcement regime for the country.

Keep in mind that F-Gas will bring an estimated 425,000 cooling systems into a leak inspection regime for the first time, and up to a 1,000 new companies are expected to require certification. And that's in addition to all those existing systems that should be already undergoing leak inspections, but may not be. This suggests the two inspectors are going to be busy.

But that is only the half of it. A key change in the new regulation is that the person supplying refrigerant is now responsible for ensuring the customer has the appropriate F-Gas certification. As a result, the industry is braced for a lot more questioning of certification — because the supplier doesn't want to get into trouble.

And who will be required to do the necessary follow-up inquiries? Why, one of the two brave inspectors, of course.

The enforcement regime looks woefully inadequate, and thus this consultation, which was due to close on Jan. 20, is seen by many as a last chance for the industry to make its feelings known to the U.K. government.

There will be many industry eyes on the official response in the spring. Dare we hope that the U.K. will take a page out of the U.S. EPA's book and start making examples of refrigerant transgressors? I will keep you informed.