Five thousand homes at Lodge Hill, Kent. Able Marine Energy Park, the Humber. Hunterston power station, Ayrshire. M4 relief road, Newport. All schemes the RSPB has opposed or is opposing. All special places protected by environmental legislation, not only because these are officially protected areas, but also because special environmental rules apply to major development, wherever it is.
We’ve said a lot about one set of rules, the Habitats Directive, elsewhere. Earlier this year, a Defra review of its implementation concluded that it did not act as a brake on economic development.
The spotlight is now turning on a sister Directive, known as the Environmental Impact Assessment, or EIA, Directive. It’s been an essential feature of the planning system since it was adopted in 1985. In fact, EIA in one form or another has been around internationally for more than 40 years. In Europe, Britain led the way in the 1970s with EIA of oil and gas development.
Unlike the Habitats Directive, the EIA Directive’s focus is not so much on special places, but on the types of development that could have a significant environmental impact, wherever they are.
Its purpose is to provide a high level of protection to the environment by providing information about the environmental impacts of development to the decision-maker, usually a local planning authority or the Secretary of State. However, the resulting report isn’t simply a compendium of information, but should be the output of a rigorous assessment of the potentially significant environmental impacts of a proposed project.
Like all European environmental legislation, it has a secondary, economic, purpose of ensuring that no Member State in the single market gains unfair competitive advantage through laxer environmental regulation. The rules apply to all – although there is a certain amount of discretion in how Member States apply the rules.
But where it comes from is perhaps immaterial. If we didn’t have it, we’d need to reinvent it to provide a similar level of protection to the environment. UK planning law and policy wouldn’t fill the gap – why should it, when we’ve relied on EIA for more than 25 years?
It’s not perfect, though, and following a thorough review, the European Commission has drafted some proposals to rectify its weaknesses. We broadly welcome these, and note that some of them will benefit developers, such as issuing one assessment when different directives are involved. Some of them may on first reading seem onerous, but we believe will actually make the system more efficient, such as mandatory pre-application scoping, when the information needed is agreed upfront, avoiding delays later in the process.
Last week Secretary of State Eric Pickles announced his opposition to the Commission’s proposals, and also a review of the implementation of the Directive in England.
You can judge for yourself whether his priority is to provide a high level of protection for the environment (and avoid the cost to the environment of the wrong development) or reduce the costs to business.
I’m sure we’ll be saying more about both the Commission’s proposals and the Secretary of State’s.
You can find out more about EIA here.