The Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) scheme has finally received its evaluation, and there are some surprises.
Since 2019, SECR has required certain businesses to report on their energy use and the carbon emissions associated with it. The theory behind it: obliging businesses to measure and publish their energy and carbon figures will encourage them to get those numbers down, supporting the UK’s net zero target.
The previous scheme with this remit was the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, formerly known as the Carbon Reduction Commitment. SECR replaced it and was designed to be both simpler and broader in scope. The government originally planned to review SECR’s success after five years, so the January 2026 report comes a little late.
Has SECR driven down energy consumption?
The good news: energy use and carbon emissions of businesses in scope have definitely come down since SECR came in. The reductions are both measurable and statistically significant.
The bad news: we don’t actually know if SECR can take the credit for this. Businesses responding to the survey pointed to other regulatory obligations and hikes in energy costs as their reasons for using less energy. SECR clearly isn’t the only driver of energy efficiency measures.
Has SECR been successful?
The scheme has been successful in its aim of getting businesses to report more data. 79% of businesses who comply with SECR said that they are putting more energy and carbon information in the public domain than they would have otherwise.
But the point of the reporting was to motivate behavioural change. DESNZ and its consultant partners had a theory of how SECR should bring this about:
- In any context, tracking a specific metric increases the focus on that metric. Just as step trackers encourage you to walk more, compulsory reporting should make businesses think about their energy consumption and the associated emissions and hopefully try to reduce them.
- The process of gathering data on energy use is a chance to map the organisation’s consumption profile and identify opportunities for efficiency savings.
- Making energy and carbon data public increases external pressure on businesses from customers, shareholders and potential investors.
According to the report, SECR brings about change – but not for long. Impact analysis suggests that SECR “appears to have a diminishing impact over time”. It looks as if 2021 was the peak year for reductions in energy use and associated emissions, for most businesses in scope.
It’s possible that businesses in the early days of SECR concentrated on the “low-hanging fruit”: easy efficiency measures that pay for themselves quickly. After tackling those, the remaining possibilities are more difficult and expensive with a longer pay-off. So there would be a levelling off of progress after a couple of years. This doesn’t mean SECR is unsuccessful.
Is SECR value for money?
Like most compliance schemes, SECR requires funds to run and places an administrative burden on the internal resources of businesses. The evaluation report puts the entire cost of SECR from 2019 to 2025 at £3,000 million.
Every pound spent on SECR delivers £2.72 of benefits
The benefits are bigger. One of the big positives from SECR is an improvement in air quality. The Royal College of Physicians estimates that air pollution costs the UK around £27 billion annually, so any changes to make our air cleaner will deliver big savings to the public purse. SECR delivers this, alongside other benefits like carbon savings, calculated as a total benefit of £8,100 million.
Cost of SECR: £3,000 million Benefits from SECR: £8,100 million Net benefit to society of introducing SECR: £5,100 million. |
That’s unarguably value for money. Every pound spent on SECR delivers £2.72 of benefits.
What should happen with SECR now?
Since SECR was brought in, we have new international standards for climate disclosures. The government has been working on adopting these into UK law, and the UK Sustainability Reporting Standards (SRS) should be published any day now. If SECR is updated in future, the new version will need to be in line with the UK SRS.
Meanwhile, the government has been consulting on the regulations around Scope 3 (the emissions in an organisation’s value chain) and whether it should be compulsory to report more emissions in this category. Right now, most Scope 3 reporting is voluntary under SECR. It’s possible that a future version will require more compulsory Scope 3 reporting.
SECR in numbers
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Back in October 2025, we predicted two possible futures for SECR:
- It could be upgraded to meet the UK SRS, which means more reporting requirements for organisations in scope; or
- It could be scrapped and replaced with something else – which would also be in line with the UK SRS, so there would be more reporting requirements either way.
January’s evaluation report finds that as intended, SECR is simpler than the reporting framework it replaced. Most businesses found that SECR compliance becomes less of an administrative burden as time goes on, and some have moved from hiring outside firms to doing it all more cheaply in-house. The data gathered for SECR compliance can be easily reused for other reporting requirements too.
This leads us to think that SECR will stay for now. At any rate, we can’t expect any changes until after the UK SRS is published. Businesses should keep their SECR measuring and reporting systems in place for at least the next year.
For advice on SECR or other aspects of energy and compliance reporting, get in touch with Sustainable Energy First.