Paul Hopwood
Environment Canterbury
As Team Leader for Regulatory Intelligence at Environment Canterbury, Paul oversees the creation of modern, risk-driven methods for understanding and reporting compliance activity. His background in science and experience in Consenting and Implementation drives his interest in advancing data quality, analytical capability, and evidence-based decision-making to strengthen regulatory outcomes.
A Smart, enabling compliance service
In Waitaha/Canterbury, the complexity of the regulatory system has grown over time. This has led to a corresponding increase in the number of resource consents and conditions requiring monitoring. With 26,000 active resource consents and over 500,000 conditions, we have been forced to innovate and adapt how we deliver our compliance service to the community.
Environment Canterbury has developed a Compliance Improvement Programme to tackle this challenge. The programme is intended to deliver improvement across three foundational pieces of a good compliance service:
Doing the right work – making sure that our CME resources are being used where they are most impactful by building better intelligence around where compliance risk is held and improving how this informs decision making.
Using the right processes and tools – ensuring that our digital tools and systems are supporting staff to do their work and enable customers to demonstrate compliance effectively and efficiently.
Focused on delivering outcomes – monitoring performance of the compliance service through tracking how compliance risk is reducing over time, rather than tracking outputs.
To achieve this transformational change, we have identified a range of key shifts to be made across the compliance service. Improvements are being made to systems and processes, digital investment, improved data and intelligence foundations to inform decision making, working in partnership with Papatipu Rūnanga Environmental Entities, building customer-centric self-service functions to support audit-by-exception where compliance risk is low, and updating the fees and charges structure for the compliance service.
This work is supporting Environment Canterbury to become a modern, smart and enabling regulator.