A message from Matthew Farrow, director at EIC.

EIC is your trade association, and we are here to help you in any way we can in what I know is a very difficult time for many of you. The team and I have already managed to speak to quite a few of you individually and we will continue to do this, but we are also doing the following:

Providing information: The Government has introduced a number of schemes to help firms in the current crisis; the detail is still evolving but further information is contained in the links below. If you have a specific question though that you cannot find the answer to email me and we will find out the answer for you or seek clarification from Government. In addition, our sister organisation ACE is organising a series of webinars to help businesses through the next few weeks, most of which will be relevant to any business.

Helping members to share views: We are setting up regular short zoom (video/telephone conference) sessions for each of our working groups to help members stay in touch and share information, concerns and ideas. You will be contacted with details if you are a member of a working group but feel free to email us if you want to know when your group is having its next session.

Lobbying Government for specific support for environmental sector: From talking to many of you I know that you will have specific things which government could do to ease the pressure on your part if the industry. This can be as varied as temporarily relaxing driver working hour restrictions to enable business continuity in the waste management sector, or speeding up the issuing of Defra consultancy contracts to provide stable demand for SME consultancy services. I am in conversation with government officials on a number of these topics and we will use the specific droup sessions to agree priorities but do email me with ideas as well.

We are also working with ACE to put pressure on Ministers to protect the future infrastructure pipeline, which I know for many of you will be a key part of your market.

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