Last month we held our Spring Conference 2025 in Manchester and it was our biggest and best yet. With 76 passionate professionals in the room from all cohorts of the industry, we tackled key challenges in environmental compliance, shared insights, and sparked important conversations.

We are excited to kick-start the year with three events that are not to miss:

As the year draws to a close, I am delighted to reflect on the tangible progress AEnvCoW has made in our key strategic areas, thanks to the hard work of our volunteers. Here are some highlights from 2024:

Watch what we got up to at our Annual Conference 2023 in this quick video!

Our conference for 2023 was held in The Guildhall in York on the theme Construction Environmental Compliance: What are the Challenges & Where are the Opportunities?

We are looking for volunteers to be part of a team working to draft industry guiding principles.

If you are interested in being a part of this team, we would be most grateful if you could sign up using the form below before 01/12/23: 

https://forms.gle/p6okwAGGLAT9TYEj6

We are more than happy to provide further information on this, should you wish for it, so please do get in touch at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

We were delighted to participate in Scottish Government consultation last week regarding environmental governance. We have supported it’s proposal to establish an environmental court, which we believe would enhance environmental governance and help drive up environmental compliance and outcomes. A critical element to this is monitoring data, and the role of an Environmental Clerks of Works, which we are promoting and defining with Government Agencies and other stakeholders.

As part of our ongoing partnership with IEMA, AECoW was invited to participate in it’s consultation on Environmental Outcome Reports through our joint Post Consent Environmental Performance Working Group. Summary key information is below and further information is on IEMA’s website here. The full final response from the Working Group is located here.

We were delighted to meet the RSPB again on the 26th May. We discussed several items of mutual interest, including:

– Parliamentary Questions
– Planning conditions for EnvCoWs
– Construction  / temporary assessments of EIAs & RSPBs responses to them 
– Drafting Industry Guiding Principles for EnvCoWs
– Environmental Outcome Reports
– Potential areas of research that both AECoW & RSPB would support (namely to build an evidence base & highlight the need for robust EnvCoW roles and responsibilities, guidance and related regulatory reform to drive up environmental compliance).

As part of the post-Brexit arrangements, each nation within the UK set up a new non-ministerial environment agency in 2021 (Environmental Standards Scotland (ESS), The Office for Environmental Protection (England & N. Ireland), and the Interim Environmental Protection Assessor for Wales). Their main remit is to assess public body compliance with environmental law, and to identify enforcement gaps.

AECoW was delighted to meet the IES on 15th March to discuss opportunities to support each others aims and objectives. A key area we discussed was Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA). The IES has an EIA Working Group and it has published a recent paper here on the future of EIA, which was central to our meeting.