Environmental assessment
Since the 1970s, legislation has grown up around the world to protect and improve the environment by requiring the assessment and management of development’s environmental effects. England’s environmental laws include several longstanding environmental assessment regimes, including EIA, SEA and HRA. These generally aim to examine the possible environmental consequences of development activities to inform decisions on whether and how they should proceed. They also help to secure public participation in environmental decision-making. They can identify measures to avoid, mitigate or offset harm, as well as measures to deliver environmentally beneficial outcomes.
This report examines the implementation in England of EIA, SEA and HRA, which we refer to collectively as the ‘environmental assessment regimes’.
These regimes apply separately but are interrelated. They have different objectives, cover different (but overlapping) activities and follow different procedures. The regimes should each contribute to environmental protection and improvement. Each is essential to identifying pressures and drivers of environmental harm. EIA and SEA serve to encourage (though not mandate) decision-makers to ensure that such pressures and drivers are avoided, prevented, reduced or offset. They also encourage decision-makers to adopt identified opportunities for environmental improvement. In the case of HRA, it mandates that identified pressures and drivers which may affect certain protected wildlife sites are addressed.
Such assessments have been relied on extensively to deliver more environmentally sensitive outcomes. Environmental assessment will continue to be essential in helping secure Government’s objectives to significantly improve the natural environment within a generation, whether that is in terms of improving air and water quality, restoring biodiversity, minimising waste or mitigating and adapting to climate change.
The environmental assessment regimes operate primarily through development control (whether via town and country planning or development consent processes for nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs)). They do, though, extend beyond development control. For example, HRA can be required for activities such as gamebird management and groundwater abstraction, neither of which need involve ‘development’. EIA can be required for agricultural land improvement and for certain types of permitted development (e.g. drainage improvement works). SEA requirements extend to plans and programmes arising outside the planning system, such as River Basin Management Plans and Flood Risk Management Plans.
In considering any reforms to environmental assessment laws, it is important to understand which aspects of the regimes work well, which do not and, in either case, why this is so. Changes to law or practice can then build on their strengths while addressing barriers to achieving the intended outcomes in the most efficient and effective way.