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Environmental Impact - reserved matters |
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The ECJ has held that an Environmental Impact Assessment may need to be
carried out at the reserved matters stage of the planning process, if it
becomes apparent then that the whole project is likely to have significant
effects on the environment. The ECJ decision means that the EIA Regs and
Circular 02/99 will have to be amended.
The EU Directive on which the EIA Regs is based requires an environmental
impact assessment before any ‘development consent’ is granted. The EU
Directive says that ‘development consent’ means ‘the decision… which entitles
the developer to proceed’, but it has not proved easy to translate that provision
into UK planning law, partly because the reserved matters approval stage is not,
in most cases, treated as a planning permission. Accordingly, the general
assumption has, in the past, been that the reserved matters stage is not a
development consent either. However, that approach has now been ruled to be
incorrect. According to Herbert Smith, the best advice for developers is:
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always exercise great caution where outline consent has been granted,
but not all reserved matters have been approved;
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in any case where details are being added to principles established at the
outline stage, the environmental effect of those details should be
considered formally by the LA;
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where the outline scheme included an Environmental Statement,
developers may well find themselves repeating the process simply to get
reserved matters approved;
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if the environmental ‘baseline’ changes the evolution of the scheme, or
because of higher regulatory standards, then developers may have to modify
earlier assessment work (or perhaps prepare an Environmental Statement
even when one was not required originally). Source: Herbert Smith.
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July 2006 |
