Which UK sustainability regimes apply where
Company law is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act 1998; environmental protection is not. That single structural fact is why SECR, the climate-disclosure duty and UK SRS are UK-wide law, while permitting, the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard and Biodiversity Net Gain fracture into separate regimes for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — each checked here against the instrument's own extent provision, not assumed from a guidance page.
Reserved company law, devolved environment
One clause in the Scotland Act 1998 explains why a reporting duty made under the Companies Act is always UK-wide, and why a permitting regime made under environmental legislation almost never is.
Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998, Part II, Head C, Section C1, names the reserved matter verbatim: “The creation, operation, regulation and dissolution of types of business association.” 1 Company law is that matter. It is reserved to Westminster, full stop, which is why a duty built inside the Companies Act 2006 cannot vary by nation even if a future government wanted it to.
Environmental protection is not named anywhere in Schedule 5. It is devolved by the Act's residual rule at s.29(2)(b) — whatever is not reserved falls within the Scottish Parliament's competence — rather than by any single clause that hands it over. That distinction matters for how you read this page: there is no equivalent "environment is devolved" provision to cite, because devolution of unreserved matters is structural, not itemised.
The pattern that follows from this holds for every regime checked below, with one stated qualification and one genuine gap: UK ETS is UK-wide despite sitting outside company law entirely, and MEES's own extent has not been settled by any clause in the instrument itself — both are covered in full further down this page.
The company-law regimes: one law, no exceptions
SECR and the s.414CB climate-disclosure duty both extend UK-wide — but neither says so in its own enacted regulations, which is a genuinely easy trap to fall into.
SECR sits in Schedule 7 to SI 2008/410, inserted by the Companies (Directors’ Report) and Limited Liability Partnerships (Energy and Carbon Report) Regulations 2018 (SI 2018/1155). Neither instrument's own regulation 1 or 2 contains the word "extend" — reg 1 in both is citation only, reg 2 is commencement and application. The extent statement lives instead in SI 2018/1155's Explanatory Note, a document published with the instrument but distinct from its Explanatory Memorandum: “These Regulations extend to the whole of the United Kingdom, reflecting the extent of the Companies Act 2006… and the extent of the Limited Liability Partnerships Act 2000.” 2
The s.414CB climate-disclosure duty runs the identical pattern one step further. SI 2022/31 and its LLP-equivalent SI 2022/46 also carry no extent regulation of their own — and unlike SI 2018/1155, no Explanatory Note stating unconditional UK-wide extent has been located for either. Their Explanatory Memoranda instead say, word for word: “The territorial extent of this instrument is England, Wales and Scotland. It will also extend by agreement to Northern Ireland.” 3 That "by agreement" language describes a political process, not a legal condition — but on the text alone, this entry stops short of claiming a confirmed UK-wide extent statement for this specific SI.
UK SRS itself has no extent provision to check, because it is not yet mandated by any statutory instrument — the only live legal hook is CA 2006 s.414CB(6), a substitution rule letting a company that already reports against a named framework cite it instead of repeating the disclosure, which creates no duty to adopt UK SRS at all. If UK SRS reporting is ever mandated, the mandating instrument will almost certainly be another Companies Act 2006 SI, and therefore UK-wide for the same reserved-matter reason as SECR and s.414CB — but that is a prediction from the structure above, not a citation, and this page does not treat it as settled.
UK ETS: UK-wide despite sitting outside company law
One regime in this file is UK-wide without touching the Companies Act at all — because it was built as a joint scheme from the outset, not because the reserved-matter logic above reaches it.
The Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme Order 2020, art.3, headed "Extent," is unusually direct: “This Order extends to the whole of the United Kingdom.” 4 A later amending Order, SI 2026/278 art.3, repeats the same commitment in fuller words: "extends to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland."
What makes UK ETS UK-wide is not company law — it is that emissions trading was designed as a single scheme from day one. The UK ETS Authority is a partnership of the UK Government, Scottish Government, Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, and amending Orders are laid with the consent of all four legislatures. The regulator is still territorial even though the law is not: the Environment Agency, SEPA, Natural Resources Wales and the NIEA each enforce for installations in their own nation, under the one UK-wide instrument — the mirror image of environmental permitting below, which is territorial law with a shared regulator for two of its nations rather than UK-wide law with four territorial ones.
Where it splits into separate regimes
Environmental legislation is devolved, and it shows: permitting, the pollutant inventory and Biodiversity Net Gain are each a different law with a different regulator in each nation, not one scheme with regional branches.
Environmental Permitting — England and Wales only
SI 2016/1154 reg 1(2), verbatim: "These Regulations extend to England and Wales only."
Wales is not a separate instrument the way its ESOS designation is: Natural Resources Wales co-regulates under this same England-and-Wales SI, unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, which sit under entirely different legislation.
Calling Welsh environmental permitting "devolved" in the same sense as Scottish or NI permitting overstates what the statute book actually does.
Scotland — permitting and the Pollutant Release Inventory
SEPA administers Scottish permitting and the Scottish Pollutant Release Inventory (SPRI) under the Environmental Authorisations (Scotland) Regulations 2018 (SSI 2018/219), as amended by the Environmental Authorisations (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2025 (SSI 2025/165) — a Scottish Statutory Instrument, Scotland-only by instrument type.
The 2025 amendment brought water, waste and industrial emissions activities into a framework that, as made in 2018, covered only radioactive substances.
Northern Ireland — permitting and the Pollution Inventory
The Pollution Prevention and Control (Industrial Emissions) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2013 (NISR 2013/160) is a Northern Ireland Statutory Rule, NI-only by instrument type, implementing the Industrial Emissions Directive.
As with ESOS, the instrument itself designates "the Chief Inspector" (reg 8(3)) — NIEA is DAERA’s operating name for that office in guidance, not the SI’s own term, and the register DAERA runs is the bare "Pollution Inventory," not a branded "Northern Ireland Pollution Inventory."
Biodiversity Net Gain — England only
Environment Act 2021 s.146(6) extends Part 6 (nature and biodiversity) to England and Wales, with two named exceptions that follow the extent of the provisions they amend.
But BNG’s own planning-condition duty, Sch 7A ¶1(1), narrows that further to England only — Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland carry no BNG duty at all.
One activity, four separate instruments
An industrial site's pollution-inventory reporting duty depends entirely on which nation it sits in: Environmental Permitting Regulations 2016 in England and Wales, the Environmental Authorisations (Scotland) Regulations 2018 (as amended) in Scotland, and the Pollution Prevention and Control (Industrial Emissions) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2013 in Northern Ireland.
None of the three shares a regulation number, a regulator's statutory title, or — in Scotland and Northern Ireland's case — even a settled name for the register itself.
What this page does not settle
A page about jurisdictional extent is worth less than nothing if it pretends every question was answered. Two were not, and one only looked unresolved until the right instrument was found.
MEES's own extent clause does not exist. The Energy Efficiency (Private Rented Property) (England and Wales) Regulations 2015 (SI 2015/962) carry "England and Wales" in their title and in every tagged provision — but a complete read of all 45 regulations and the Schedule, in both the as-made and current revised text, found no operative "extends to" sentence anywhere in the instrument. That is not an unfinished search: it is a proven negative from reading the whole thing. The instrument's own Explanatory Memorandum says only that it “applies to England and Wales” 5 — "applies to," not "extends to," and a Memorandum is departmental and non-operative, so it corroborates a strong inference without settling it. Separately and deliberately unresearched: whether Scotland or Northern Ireland run an equivalent private-rented-sector minimum-efficiency regime of their own. No claim is made either way — that is unresearched, not researched-and-absent.
No Gibraltar-specific sustainability disclosure regime was located. Isle of Man's Climate Change Act 2021 confines its reporting duty to public bodies by its own long title; Guernsey's regulator has stated outright it has no plans for mandatory disclosure standards; Jersey's framework is non-binding guidance layered onto existing codes for regulated firms only. For Gibraltar, no equivalent finding of any kind — general-corporate or financial-sector — was made. That absence is an absence of finding, not a finding of absence, and this page does not convert one into the other.
Crown Dependencies and Gibraltar
None of this page's UK-wide reasoning reaches Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man or Gibraltar, because none of them is part of the United Kingdom to begin with.
Not part of the UK
The Bailiwick of Jersey, the Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Isle of Man are self-governing dependencies of the Crown, connected through the Crown itself rather than through Parliament or any UK statute, and are not represented at Westminster.
The relationship is maintained through the Crown and is deliberately not written into any single constitutional document.
Gibraltar is a different thing again
Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory, not a Crown Dependency — it has its own elected Parliament and its own primary law-making power under the Gibraltar Constitution Order 2006.
Westminster’s power to legislate for it is broader in theory than over the Crown Dependencies, but is exercised even more rarely in practice; the 2018 extension of beneficial-ownership registers is the most recent example, and the UK Government itself acknowledged it read as an "overreach."
UK legislation does not extend there automatically
The default is that it does not apply at all.
Extension happens, when it happens, almost always by Order in Council under a "permissive extent clause" written into the Act itself, and requires the consent of the Island concerned — a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction, provision-by-provision process, not a blanket UK-wide extension.
A Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man or Gibraltar company is not "a company" under the Companies Act
CA 2006 s.1(1) defines "company" as one formed and registered under that Act.
A company incorporated under Gibraltar’s own Companies Act 2014, or its equivalent in Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man, fails that definition outright and falls instead into Part 34’s "overseas company" category — a lighter, branch-triggered filing duty, not the strategic-report or directors’-report duty that carries SECR and the climate-disclosure duty.
The commercially important consequence follows straight from the definition, not from any policy choice: because SECR and the climate-disclosure duty are duties of "the directors of a company" under CA 2006 s.414A, and s.1(1) defines "company" as one formed and registered under that Act, a Jersey-, Guernsey-, Isle of Man- or Gibraltar-incorporated parent is outside both duties entirely — regardless of size. That does not extend to a UK-incorporated subsidiary within the same group, which is assessed against SECR and s.414CB on its own facts, independently of where its parent sits.
The FCA's proposed Listing Rules take a different, listing-based route that bypasses incorporation entirely. FCA CP26/5 draws its scope by listing category: a Jersey- or Guernsey-incorporated company with a UK primary listing is proposed to be caught identically to a UK-incorporated issuer, while incorporation only starts to matter for a UK secondary listing. 6 Read that against the incorporation route above, not instead of it — CP26/5 was a live consultation, closed 20 March 2026, with a policy statement expected autumn 2026, so this is the FCA's proposed position, not yet a made rule.
- Reserved matterScotland Act 1998, Sch 5
- A subject Westminster keeps exclusive power over — company law is reserved by name at Head C1, which is why regimes built inside the Companies Act cannot vary by UK nation.
- Devolved matterScotland Act 1998, s.29(2)(b)
- Everything not listed as reserved falls within the Scottish Parliament’s competence by default — environmental protection included. There is no single clause "devolving" it; the absence of a reservation does the work.
- Explanatory Notelegislation.gov.uk, government-authored
- Published with a made instrument and distinct from its Explanatory Memorandum. Non-operative, but where one states an instrument’s extent — as SI 2018/1155’s does — it is the more definitive of the two documents.
- Explanatory MemorandumDepartmental, laid before Parliament
- A department’s own restatement of an instrument’s effect, including a stated territorial extent. Corroborating, not operative — and its language can be more conditional than the legal result, as with SI 2018/1155’s and SI 2022/31’s "by agreement" wording for Northern Ireland.
- Permissive extent clauseCrown Dependencies mechanism
- An enabling provision inside a UK Act allowing it to be extended to the Crown Dependencies by Order in Council, with their consent — the near-universal mechanism, since an Act extending there directly is now very unusual.
Does SECR apply in Scotland?
Yes, UK-wide, including Scotland.
Company law is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act 1998, and SECR sits inside the Companies Act 2006 framework via the Companies (Directors' Report) and Limited Liability Partnerships (Energy and Carbon Report) Regulations 2018 (SI 2018/1155).
Neither SI 2018/1155 nor its parent regulations (SI 2008/410) contains its own extent clause, but the instrument's own Explanatory Note states plainly that it extends to the whole of the United Kingdom, reflecting the extent of the Companies Act 2006 and the Limited Liability Partnerships Act 2000 that it amends.
Does the climate-disclosure duty (s.414CB) apply in Northern Ireland?
In practice, yes, but be precise about how you know that.
Neither SI 2022/31 (companies) nor SI 2022/46 (LLPs) states an extent clause in its own enacted regulations.
Their Explanatory Memoranda both say the territorial extent is England, Wales and Scotland, and that it 'will also extend by agreement to Northern Ireland' — conditional language, not a settled statement.
No Explanatory Note stating unconditional UK-wide extent has been located for either instrument.
The stronger route is structural: s.414CB sits inside the Companies Act 2006, and CA 2006 s.1284 extends 'the Companies Acts' to Northern Ireland directly, which is why the duty operates UK-wide in practice even though this specific SI has not been shown to say so itself.
Is ESOS a UK-wide scheme?
Yes — confirmed directly in the instrument.
SI 2014/1643, as its extent was confirmed by SI 2026/701 reg 1(3), extends to 'England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.' The Environment Agency administers it as scheme administrator, with SEPA, Natural Resources Wales and the NIEA acting as the territorial regulators.
Is environmental permitting the same across the UK?
No.
The Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016 (SI 2016/1154) extend to England and Wales only, with Natural Resources Wales co-regulating under that same instrument.
Scotland runs its own regime under the Environmental Authorisations (Scotland) Regulations 2018, as amended, administered by SEPA.
Northern Ireland runs its own regime under the Pollution Prevention and Control (Industrial Emissions) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2013.
These are separate legal instruments with separate regulators, not one UK-wide law with regional offices.
Does the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES) apply in Scotland or Northern Ireland?
Unresolved by design, and it is important to say so rather than guess.
SI 2015/962's title and every tagged provision say England and Wales, and its own Explanatory Memorandum states the instrument 'applies to England and Wales' — but a complete read of all 45 regulations and the Schedule found no operative extent clause anywhere in the instrument.
Whether Scotland or Northern Ireland run an equivalent private-rented-sector minimum-efficiency regime of their own has not been checked, and should not be assumed either way from MEES's own silence.
Does UK sustainability reporting law reach a company incorporated in Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man or Gibraltar?
Not through incorporation.
Companies Act 2006 s.1(1) defines 'company' as one formed and registered under that Act, and a Crown Dependency or Gibraltar company is formed under its own jurisdiction's legislation instead — so it falls outside the strategic-report duty (s.414A) that carries both SECR and the s.414CB climate-disclosure duty, and into the lighter, branch-triggered overseas-company regime at Part 34 instead.
None of the three Crown Dependencies currently runs a mandatory general-corporate sustainability regime of its own.
The FCA's proposed Listing Rules take a different route entirely: CP26/5 would catch a Jersey- or Guernsey-incorporated company by its UK primary listing, regardless of where it is incorporated.
Do UK legislation extent clauses ever apply automatically to the Crown Dependencies?
No.
UK primary legislation does not, of itself, ordinarily apply to the Crown Dependencies.
Extension happens only rarely, with the Islands' consent, almost always by Order in Council under a 'permissive extent clause' written into the enabling Act.
The Companies Act 2006 itself demonstrates this: only one specific power, over Part 28 (takeovers), has actually been exercised, extending that one Part to the Isle of Man — Part 15, which carries SECR and s.414CB, has no equivalent Order in Council.
Related guides & references
SECR legislation — the Companies Act power behind it
The Companies Act architecture that makes SECR reserved, UK-wide law
ESOS Enabling Powers: the Energy Act 2023 sections behind the scheme
Why ESOS sits outside company law and how it is still confirmed UK-wide
ESOS vs SECR — two regimes, two statutory bases
How the two regimes this page anchors on differ in scope and enforcement
ESOS penalties and fines
How the four territorial regulators enforce one UK-wide instrument
UK SRS Legislation and Legal Status
Why UK SRS has no extent to check yet — it is not mandated by any SI
SECR Compliance Guide
The reporting duty that this page traces back to a reserved matter