Apologies for yesterday's inexplicable font crisis. I hope this is easier to read.
Yesterday's Daily Telegraph reports that the Coalition Government is accused by planning experts of taking the 'nuclear option' on planning by giving developers power to push ahead without council approval and environmental assessments.
Digging underneath the somewhat hysterical headline, this boils down to two things: a proposal that local planning authorities should be given a fixed time to ‘sign off’ conditions attached to planning permissions, and a second proposal that the current threshold for urban development projects which require formal Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) should be raised.
I haven’t yet seen the details, but I understand (and sincerely hope) that the Government will consult on both proposals. The DT quotes concerns from Richard Blyth of the Royal Town Planning Institute and Councillor Mike Jones of the Local Government Association about the proposal on conditions, both of whom I agree with. Conditions are important for protecting wildlife too, and sometimes there are things that can only be done at certain times of year, so imposing arbitrary deadlines is problematic for nature.
But I’d like to focus on some of the myths about EIA, both in the DT and in a statement from the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG).
Firstly, the proposal is unlikely to exempt ‘thousands’ of developments from the need for EIA, as the DT claims. In the whole of the UK, only about 500 projects each year are subject to EIA. To get this in proportion, that’s about 0.1% of all planning applications in the UK. Although I don’t have detailed figures, only a proportion of the 500 will be urban development projects (e.g. a housing estate or shopping centre), and not all of these are in England.
More seriously, DCLG is quoted as saying that ‘Environmental impact assessments stem from European Union law and impose significant costs on the planning system, over and above long-standing, domestic environmental safeguards'.
The first part of this is of course true.
The middle part (‘significant costs’) ignores the fact that EIA projects by their nature are likely to impose significant costs on the environment, and that the cost to the developer is usually a tiny proportion of the overall project costs.
The final part (‘long standing, domestic environmental safeguards’) is just nonsense. In the UK, EIA has been built into the planning process since 1988 (in fact it was invented in the US in the ‘60s). It doesn’t replace or duplicate any domestic safeguards, but provides a high level of protection against damaging projects and for sensitive places, both by the information it provides to the decision-maker and the rigorous process which is required. If you took it away, the environment would be protected worse.
It would be more accurate to say ‘Environmental impact assessments stem from long-standing European Union law and are designed to minimise significant costs to the environment, providing a level of protection over and above the domestic environmental safeguards we had before.'
Deciding what does or does not need EIA has to start with the question, ‘Is there is a significant environmental effect?’ not with cost-cutting in mind.
Where I agree with DCLG is that there’s a problem with information overload. But the solution is not to fiddle with thresholds but to introduce mandatory scoping and to make sure that local authorities are properly resourced. That will enable all parties to focus on the issues that really matter; and I note that under the terms of the recently-agreed text of the revised EIA Directive, it’s entirely in the gift of the UK to require scoping.