In praise of schedules

Hugh Watson from AMEC explains how clearly outlining environmental commitments can help to ensure mitigation measures take place

One of the persistent challenges in environmental impact assessment (EIA) is how to make sure the ideas for mitigation and environmental enhancement generated through the EIA process are actually put into practice.

All too often important environmental measures are omitted from the planning conditions, section 106 agreements or method statements with the result that they don’t get implemented, making a nonsense of the predicted residual effects presented in the environmental statement.

My top tip for reducing the chances of this happening is to ensure your environmental statements include a summary table of all the environmental measures agreed between the consultant and the developer. It is also a very good idea to include in this table any suggestions on how these measures should be secured and delivered, for example through a planning condition, method statement or planning obligation etc (see the example below).

This is not a new idea. In fact, tables like these have been referred to as a “schedules of environmental commitments” and included in government best practice guidance on EIA since at least 1997.

Nevertheless, it is still common to find environmental statements where no such table is included, and in such cases it means that the competent authority and consultees have to work much harder to identify the environmental measures which need to be delivered through the consenting process.

Occasionally you will get a client (or their legal adviser) who will say that you shouldn’t “invite conditions”, and try to persuade the consultant that including the schedule in the environmental statement is not in the client’s best interests. However, if the client is not prepared to commit to having measures conditioned, then it has to be assumed they will not be implemented and the environmental statement will therefore have to present an assessment of the unmitigated scheme.

Indeed, I favour having a statement in the introductory section of the environmental statement along these lines:

“A range of environmental measures has been identified during the course of the EIA and the development of the scheme design. The reasons for their inclusion are explained in the relevant sections of the environmental statement, and they have been summarised in the schedule of environmental commitments included in Chapter XX.

“For the purposes of assessment of environmental effects it has been assumed that all of these environmental measures will be fully implemented. Should the competent authority not require their implementation, or should it impose alternative measures, then the conclusions reached in this environmental statement may need to be modified.”

When reviewing an environmental statement specialist consultees often only read the topic chapter of direct relevance to them, so it is important to include a schedule of the relevant environmental commitments in the topic chapters, even if a composite multi-disciplinary master schedule is included in the scheme description chapter or in a summary chapter.

This also means it is easier for the competent authority and consultees to see why a particular environmental measure needs to be built into the development which is important because if the need and rationale are unclear competent authorities may dismiss environmental measures as merely an over-enthusiastic response from single-issue specialists.

Example of a schedule of environmental commitments

This article was written as a contribution to the EIA Quality Mark’s commitment to improving EIA practice.

Hugh Watson is a technical director of ecology at AMEC