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When you’re immersed in legislation and policy, a regulatory dive into the highs and lows of the past 12 months feels a little daunting. So much always happens. The first full year of a Labour government should provide a useful snapshot, but it’s a landscape that has shifted dramatically over the past year.
Global temperatures continue to rise. The summer of 2025 was the hottest on record for the UK, intensifying the climate crisis – a reality juxtaposed with the Trump administration’s climate-change-denying narrative, and some UK political parties pushing back against net-zero policies.
Despite the challenges, the UK government has pushed on with its plan of making Britain a clean energy superpower. It quickly updated the National Planning Policy Framework, removing the de-facto ban on onshore wind and tweaking the planning system to favour renewables. Several stalled solar farms were approved, and new licences for offshore oil and gas were halted. There was also a commitment to cut UK emissions by 81% before 2035. A new climate change action plan, due by the end of 2025, will outline how the government plans to meet its targets.
England’s water companies faced their worst environmental performance since 2011, highlighted by a record fine of almost £123m to Thames Water in May. One of 2025’s key pieces of legislation was the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, strengthening water regulators’ powers to hold companies and executives accountable for environmental and performance failures.
As one of Labour’s main manifesto pledges, it introduced the possibility of imprisonment and bonus bans for water executives who break the law or fail to meet high standards to protect the environment and their consumers.
The drive towards a zero-waste economy is our best chance for mainstream environmental change. We’ve moved closer to implementing a deposit return
scheme for single-use drinks containers and seen legislation that could greatly improve our relationship with packaging.
The publication of the extended producer responsibility for packaging policy modernises a 28-year-old regime by encouraging producers to use less packaging that isn’t easy to recycle, and be responsible for the materials over their lifecycle. The Simpler Recycling policy has been standardised across England too, with separate collections of glass, metal, plastic, paper, card and food waste in all businesses now mandatory. By March 2026, this will be extended to households.
Despite progress, concerns remain over the balance between economic growth and environmental protections.
Planning vs nature
Labour’s planning reforms, set out in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, are being sold as the tool to unlock development, fast-track housebuilding and deliver 1.5 million new homes.
However, the Bill has faced heavy criticism for prioritising development
over the environment. Part three, which covers development and nature recovery, has been labelled “cash to trash”, allowing developers to sidestep onsite environmental mitigation by paying into a Nature Restoration Fund. As the Bill travels through parliament, ‘appeasement’ amendments have already been tabled to make the legislation less regressive.
Falling behind the EU
Despite Labour’s manifesto pledge to not dilute standards, the UK is falling behind the EU on environmental protections. The EU has introduced 28 new, revised or updated pieces of environmental legislation that the UK has not adopted. The biggest deviation is in the failure to adopt some revamped EU directives into UK law. We have evaded stricter urban wastewater treatment standards, including the removal of micropollutants, and a tightening of standards around air quality, industrial emissions, ozone-depleting substances and fluorinated greenhouse gases. The EU has banned 13 dangerous chemicals since Brexit, with a further 41 on its watchlist. The numbers for the UK? Zero.
An extensive Defra consultation has proposed major reforms to the
environmental permitting regime, aiming to overhaul England’s outdated
industrial emissions permitting framework. Focused on industrial
activities, including installations and medium combustion plants, the
proposals set out the benefits for a modernised environmental regime
with greater flexibility, faster timelines and less red tape. These reforms could be pivotal as the government attempts to align pollution control with economic, environmental and technological ambitions.
Mandatory digital waste tracking is due to be implemented by October 2026,
starting with permitted and licensed waste sites. By 2027, the scheme will be expanded to include waste carriers, brokers and dealers, as well as operators working under registered waste exemptions. Defra is working with industry to prepare the sector for the changes. A public beta phase should be up and running by spring 2026.
One of the highlights of 2025 was the extra powers to hold water companies
to account. Plans to strengthen this further may follow in 2026. Penalties for frequent or minor offences are currently hard to impose as they require criminal-level proof. Proposed changes would allow enforcement to a civil standard, making penalties quicker and easier to apply. A penalty cap, possibly up to £500,000, could be enforced, along with automatic, fixed penalties for certain breaches, such as failure to report pollution incidents.
The HSE, alongside Defra, is consulting on restricting PFAS in firefighting foams, following an assessment which concluded that PFAS pose significant environmental and health risks that are not adequately managed under current controls, with an estimated 48 tonnes released into the environment every year. Also crucial is that the proposal aims to address the cycle of ‘regrettable substitution’, where one harmful chemical is simply replaced by another with similar potential for harm.
We might finally see the publication of UK Forest Risk Commodity Regulations (UKFRC). A UKFRC would establish a framework to address illegal deforestation in UK supply chains, by regulating the import and use of high-risk products, such as soy, cocoa, palm oil and cattle products.
Neil Howe PISEP is head of writing at Barbour EHS
