ABSTRACT
The Environment Agency, as a regulator responsible for the development and enforcement of standards, is a vehicle of social change. This chapter draws and builds on a court based study conducted by H. Croall in the 1980s, in the analogous context of consumer protection prosecutions. Croall's general conclusions were that the styles of defence and mitigation used by defendants perpetuated a 'trivialisation' of their offences. A strategy of mitigation deserving of comment drew attention to the effort required to comply with existing regulation. Many of the mitigation arguments potentially undermined the crim-inalisation and stigmatisation of the offences, which in many respects is the cornerstone of the Agency's attempts to promote deterrence. Trivialisation of environmental offences can only serve as an impediment to enforcement as a whole, for if the implications of criminalisation are neutralised, then for the large scale operators, so is the threat of prosecution.
