Government have today published new planning guidance for local authorities in England on renewable energy, following similar guidance for oil and gas earlier this month.
These are part of a suite of guidance aimed at Local Authorities and other users of the planning system, but their publication has been brought forward to help deliver the Coalition’s increasingly damaging pursuit of shale gas and to give communities “more say against poorly sited or inadequately justified turbines”. Both were published without public consultation.
Officially, guidance is not ‘new’ policy, but Local Authorities are expected to abide by it unless they have good reason not to. This means that these guidance notes will be influential in town halls across England, and will therefore help determine what is and isn’t built over the coming years.
Whilst the guidance on oil and gas development take a facilitative tone, explaining how fracking will work and its regulatory process, the renewables guidance focuses heavily on landscape and visual impacts. Indeed, ‘landscape’ is mentioned three times in the oil and gas note, compared to 33 times in the renewable guidance. My guess is that this is unlikely to be as a result of an objective assessment that found that the visual impact of wind turbines is 11 times greater than shale drill pads!
Language aside, most worrying is the statement in the renewables guidance that “protecting local amenity is an important consideration which should be given proper weight in planning decisions”. This sounds innocuous enough, but in reality ‘local amenity’ is so general that any windfarm could be argued to negatively affect it. It goes without saying that no such statement is made in relation to fracking.
The one redeeming feature of the guidance is its endorsement of a spatial approach to renewables. It recommends that Local Authorities proactively seek to identify where renewables are most appropriate given local environmental conditions. This is an approach we have long advocated as we believe it gives clarity to developers and the public alike, although we believe that the priority should be minimising the risk of irreversible impacts on wildlife.
This small hint of progress does little, however, to change the fact that these Guidance notes are just another part of the Government’s attempt to stack the odds against clean energy and in favor of dirty fossil fuels.
In the end, the planning system has a job to do. It needs to weigh up the pros and cons of proposed development to local communities and to the country alike, and make fair and balanced decisions. The political meddling that is behind the tone and balance of these guidance notes helps no one, and will only lead to more conflict in communities affected by energy developments. Maybe it’s time the Coalition took a step back and let planners get on with their job.
This is sound advice and I note that RSPB has formally objected to one of the Lancashire sites which I also welcome. However I’m concerned that there is no background to this move on the web site. The RSPB should do more to call for an informed public debate and join with others in pressing the Government to commission a fully comprehensive expert and objective SEA. Its completely absurd that each application for shale gas extraction may well require a separate EIA when so many of the issues are generic, eg CO2 .This will just create income for a host of consultants and we know that the capacity and willingness to provide truly objective information and for the consenting authorities to effectively assess such studies is either lacking or compromised. This is not simply about nesting swans ( important though they are) which already how it is coming across in the media. The fog of misinformation is growing.