We are pleased to publish our Annual Report, setting out the review of our performance against the targets set in our 2018-2021 Corporate Plan by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), which we fully met and delivered.
Across the last 22 years we have provided independent assurance to HMRC that landfill tax monies diverted to the LCF are spent compliantly in accordance with the Landfill Tax Regulations 1996 (Regulations). During this time the LCF has supported over 4,000 Environmental Bodies (EBs) to complete almost 60,000 local community or environmental projects, with a value of more than £1.5 billion.
Alongside our core role of providing assurance to HMRC, we also work hard to support the sector, reducing the administrative burden on EBs and using our 'coaching to compliance' ethos to ensure that EBs and projects remain compliant with the Regulations. As part of this ethos, we have also continued to work with individual EBs where breaches of the Regulations were identified. During 2018/2019 there were several open cases of EBs spending non-compliantly. We worked with the EBs to ensure any loss to the Fund was rectified and a total of more than £314,000 was recovered in relation to five cases.
Furthermore, the first year of the plan to oversee the closure of the scheme in Wales has progressed well, with funds reducing from £1.3m at 30 June 2018 to £800k at 31 March 2019.
As part of our continuous improvement we also considered it appropriate in 2018/2019 to review and update ENTRUST's aim, vision, mission and values which define how we work both with our key external stakeholders and internally amongst our staff.
Some other key achievements during the year included:
- We maintained levels of satisfaction with our regulatory services at 86 per cent;
- We delivered all of our objectives and met all of HMRC's agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs);
- We published our framework for reviewing, monitoring and managing the level of administrative costs and unspent funds;
- We continued to report to HMRC to show the value of the LCF monies held by EBs year on year and the percentage of adminstration costs they claim; and
- We published our third Value for Money (VfM) of the LCF report which shows that 99.8 per cent of LCF projects completed in 2017/2018 achieved their intended aims and 76 per cent of these brought together people from different backgrounds.
The full document and short summary version are available on the right hand side of this page.