Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

Question 1b.   Background paper 2 prepared for this enquiry takes a pejorative view of "balance" in the town and country planning regime, arguing that it means weighing up competing interests and deciding in favour of one at the expense of the other - in particular in favour of development at the expense of aspects of the environment. Up to a point this is what happens. For example, the planning regime has the task of protecting environment assets designated by other regulatory regimes, e.g. SSSIs designated under wildlife legislation. Town and country planning policy has traditionally treated such designations as statements of a particular value, which can always be outweighed in a given instance by another interest for which that site ranks even higher on that interest's scale of values. (This is why it is usually national government projects, such as trunk road schemes, which are responsible for damaging such sites - only a development of such importance is likely to be valued highly enough to outweigh the environmental value).

However, the reality is that few planning decisions are that black and white. In truth, the regime generally seeks to ameliorate the negative impacts of development on the environment, by negotiation and by the imposition of conditions and the securing of planning agreements. Thus on average its attitude is more properly characterised as somewhere between trading off environmental capital where it considers it worth it ("balance" in the sense of background paper 2), and some attempt to retain environmental capital by modifying development proposals and securing an element of environmental compensation for them. To that degree, a case can be made for the regime operating an approach close to weak sustainability.

Some would of course like to see it adopt an approach closer to strong sustainability, in which environmental imperatives are respected at all costs. The strong sustainability approach however raises very real difficulties in practice of identifying what is an environmental imperative, in the sense of a critical asset that must be defended at all costs. At a general level, there is a philosophical issue about what type of asset is critical. At one extreme, those who believe that environmental sustainability concerns only ecological systems would exclude cultural heritage assets like ancient monuments, because their fate does not affect such systems. Others might point out that whatever humans do is highly unlikely to disturb basic life support systems to a greater degree than nonhuman factors already do (e.g. human induced excess global warming is smaller than oscillations during the last ice ages), and that sustainable development should focus more on "soft" assets closer to the everyday concerns of most people, including somewhat intangible cultural ones. As Susan Owens has pointed out, the dilemma facing planners trying to plan for more sustainable development is that the town and country planning regime actually exerts stronger and more direct control over assets, such as countryside amenity or landscape heritage, which some would not see as within the ambit of environmental sustainability, whereas it exerts only rather weak and indirect control over ecosystem services.

The difficulty of sorting the critical asset from the non-critical arises also within particular kinds of asset. Consider natural heritage assets. The pragmatic solution has been simply to assume that national or international designations are themselves a statement of criticality. No need to reinvent the wheel: the job has already been done. For example, in the case of nature conservation sites, the European Habitats Directive has forced the UK government to accept that Natura 2000 sites designated under the directive must be defended in all but the most extreme circumstances of national interest. Under strong sustainability, they can be treated as critical assets.

The problem with this pragmatic - and bureaucratic - approach is that it can lead to nonsensical outcomes, dependent on the state of the bureaucracy. Thus, in the case of the Cairngorm funicular railway application, the natural heritage agency SNH was forced to defend the adjacent proposed Natura 2000 site by preventing summer access to it from the top station of the proposed railway. There was however no scenic designation of international standing over the site, simply because no international scheme yet exists (although a European scheme is on the way). SNH accepted the building of the railway, with very obvious visual impact, in return for a management plan which stated that visitors would not be allowed out of the top station on to the hill. None of the parties is happy with this solution. It can be attributed to the relative ease of identifying internationally important sites on biodiversity grounds as compared with less readily quantifiable scenic values. If you believe environmental sustainability is only about ecology and biodiversity, you may find this outcome appropriate; if you think environmental sustainability is about much more than that, you will not.

Question 1c.   The basic alternatives that suggest themselves here are a regulatory approach and a market tool approach. In the field of industrial pollution control, the relative merits of the command-and-control and market instrument approaches are well rehearsed; in general, the latter is best seen as supplementing the former where it can be made to work. In the field of countryside management, experience suggests that positive financial incentives are more effective at protecting environmental assets in than is a regulatory approach. Specifically, the 1981 SSSI regime was founded on telling land managers what they cannot do and bribing them not to do it if they do not cooperate willingly. The Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESA) farming support scheme brought in under the 1986 Agriculture Act demonstrated that the reverse approach, reimbursing farmers for positive management actions to favour environmental assets, was more effective and far less contentious. The lesson was well taken, and now the natural heritage agencies have shifted the SSSI regime to offering payments to carry out positive actions to favour the wildlife interest for which the site was designated.

Question 1d.   The first question is still debated not just in practice, but in legal theory! Certainly the shift to a plan-led system has the potential to make town and country planning a more effective instrument for achieving environmental sustainability. This is the more so, given the spread of the practice of first environmental, and now sustainability, appraisal of Development Plans.

Some housebuilders maintain that local planning authorities use the plan-led system to suppress to an unacceptable degree applications for housing development on green field sites, which they argue are in the public interest. Meantime, the high-tech business development application that brings with it lots of jobs and an environmentally attractive image, but is in no way catered to in the approved plan, is still likely to be approved.

With regard to the presumption in favour of development, an interesting event in the evolution of policy on development control is the recent revision of national planning guidance on opencast coal mining. This followed the Labour Party's pre-election manifesto Ten Point Plan to curb opencasting, in response to the high political profile this specific type of development has attained in e.g. northeast England. The new guidance almost reverses the burden of proof to presume against development rather than in favour of it: permission shall not be granted except where the (local) community will gain a net benefit. This raises the intriguing question of whether over time certain kinds of development might be black-balled in this way, such that we end up with two classes of developments, those for which there is a presumption in favour (where the application conforms with the Development Plan), and those for which there is a presumption against. However, it could be pleaded that minerals developments form a special case, since they can occur only where God chose to site the minerals, whereas virtually all other bad neighbour developments can in principle be located anywhere.

Question 1f.  In general, cumulative impact is not explicitly dealt with. However, one could claim that an advantage of the unusually discretionary nature of the UK town and country planning regime, which treats all applications on their merits (even under a plan-led system), is that it is free to take local circumstances into account in determining an application. Such local circumstances can clearly include cumulation. With regard to cumulation, the revised opencast guidance is again of interest, because it expressly enables cumulation to be taken into account (the objections to opencasting to a considerable degree being to the relentless pressure over decades on communities of successive mines or extensions of mines within a locality, and the development blight which results).

Question 1h.   The town and country planning regime certainly has a contribution to make to limiting both the emission of some GHGs (mainly CO2, but indirectly also methane), and the effects of climate change which these emissions drive.

A large literature addresses the contribution of the planning regime to limiting GHG emissions. This contribution breaks into perhaps four roles. The first is managing the demand for travel and the choice of travel mode, and thus CO2 emissions from vehicles. National planning guidance encourages local planning authorities to guide major developments to sites best suited to their travel generation profiles, although there is still room for the UK town and country planning regime to move to a more systematic regional approach like the Dutch ABC one. Positive moves include: the involvement of planners in integrated regional and local transport plans, the increasing requirement that developers of employment sites produce green transport plans, the limitation of parking provision, the sea-change in town and country planning philosophy from traditional segregation of employment and sensitive land uses towards mixed uses enabling more compact towns, the emphasis on securing the vitality and viability of town centres as an antidote to suburban sprawl, and the revival of interest in ways of achieving higher residential densities in urban areas without sacrificing design quality.

Nevertheless, despite experiential and modelling research, the BPEO in a given context remains far from clear at the level of settlement pattern and where to allocate large amounts of housing. An example is the decision to develop a large wedge of land in the SE Edinburgh green belt, in order to accommodate a proportion of the city's projected housing demand, while securing regeneration benefits nearby and counter-balancing the tendency of the city to develop in the opposite direction. A case is made for this solution in the Structure Plan, partly on the grounds that it will generate less travel than exporting the development beyond the green belt; but other equally convincing solutions could be put forward on the grounds of managing travel demand. It is genuinely difficult to project the travel consequences of different options at this scale of planning, since the town and country planning regime cannot actually control some of the major transport decisions (in this example, a spinal bus-only route is planned, but the councils cannot make the buses run down it - they can only tempt the bus companies with subsidies if the route does not pay; and they cannot securely control whether or not a old railway line will be re-opened, which ironically might take away enough of the buses' business to render them unviable).

The second role is the influence over energy consumption in buildings. Ultimately, excepting where its owns the land, or where the site is the subject of a design competition, a local planning authority cannot require of a developer more than the minimum level of energy efficiency, because it risks losing an appeal against it. But it can lead by the example of the council's own developments, it can preach the message to applicants through site design briefs and other supplementary planning guidance, it can press for better-than-minimum standards via planning agreements, it can promote site layouts and designs which favour passive solar gain and reduce wind chill, and in the right circumstances it can promote the development of CHP/DH schemes, in which some of the council's own buildings might take part.

The third role is the regime's control over energy generating developments. Development of plant over 50MW installed capacity is under the control of the Dti, but the planning authorities are consultees, and directly control smaller developments [CHECK - DOES LPA ALSO HAVE TO GRANT FORMAL PLANNING PERMISSION FOR LARGE PLANT?]. In recent years the focus has been on wind farms and to a lesser extent waste treatment plant with energy recovery, micro-hydro and so on. To the extent that the town and country planning regime enables or constrains the development of such renewable energy plant, it can make a marginal contribution to the overall GHG emissions from the electricity generating sector for a given level of electricity output. (As it is, there is a perhaps inevitable disjunction between the renewables subsidy schemes - NFFO and its counterparts in Scotland and N Ireland - and planning policy for renewables, because an NFFO contract does not require prior planning permission, nor influences whether it will be granted).

An additional minor part of this third role is the influence of the town and country planning regime over methane emissions, through granting or refusing permission for methane generating landfills, intensive livestock plant, and gas landing, transport and treatment plant.

The fourth role is via influence over the primary industries of peat extraction and forestry. Commercial peat extraction is directly controlled by the town and country planning regime, and influences the carbon fixing budget of peat bogs. The balance of tree growth and felling can make forestry a net carbon sink or source (the critical issue here probably being whether draining blanket bog to plant trees creates a net gain or loss of carbon). Town and country planning now exerts a degree of control over the location - and thereby indirectly the level - of afforestation, through indicative forestry strategies produced by planning authorities, which must be included in Structure Plans if produced. Most afforestation takes place in Scotland, in regions covered by such plans. Local planning authorities are also consulted by the Forestry Authority on larger applications for forestry grant and on felling applications. To that extent the town planning regime could be said to exert some influence on the GHG budget, although it would probably be impossible to quantify the effect.

Having said all of the above, and while it is self-evident that the broad sweep of future settlement pattern must influence travel demand and mode, we would take the view that the potential contribution of the town and country planning regime to controlling GHG emissions will remain supplementary to more direct and trenchant tools (both regulatory ones and market ones) to manage travel, promote energy efficiency in buildings, favour low-emission energy production, and determine primary land uses.

The potential contribution of the town and country planning regime to limiting adverse effects of climate change is less clear. Perhaps the most obvious role is in keeping development and water apart. Planners ultimately control built development in flood plains and on the coast; the environmental protection agencies can only advise them as statutory consultees. The higher return frequency of sea storm surges, and the likely increase in river floods because of increased precipitation in parts of the country, are both predicted to ensue from climate change. This suggests an important role for the town and country planning regime in ensuring that development is not allowed to happen where it will be vulnerable, unless adequate defences are supplied; that the capacity of river floodplains to absorb floods is retained by controlling development thereon; and that planners should push for installation of SUDS (sustainable urban drainage systems) in developments, which control runoff and thus reduce the flashiness of rivers. The necessary planning guidance is already in place, and the requirement is that it be followed.

Secular increase in sea level (as opposed to storm surges) does not seem likely of itself to pose a major threat, as it will occur at a pace comfortably slower than the ability to respond, and the more vulnerable parts of the country have long standing institutional structures for producing sea defences. However, a particular sustainability concern which does touch the town and country planning regime is the threat of "coastal squeeze", in which the profile of shoreline habitats caught between a fixed landward line of development and a rising sea level is compacted, with eventual loss of habitats. One cannot realistically expect the built development line to retreat, so some squeeze seems inevitable on the more developed coast. However, the town and country planning regime can help obviate squeeze on undeveloped coast by preventing its development. Again, current planning guidance already provides for this, by guiding planning authorities to refuse development on undeveloped coast except when it is of a kind which requires a coastal location.

In SE England, warming threatens to dry up summer water supplies, or to raise water demand for irrigation, and we have already seen resulting applications for major reservoir developments. Here again the town and country planning system will have an influence through its attitude to such proposals, although it would not seem likely to be a significant enabler or brake on them in the longer run, as their desirability became more apparent and the issue more politicised in consequence.

Question 2a.   The river regulation authorities, EA and SEPA, are broadly organised along catchment lines. The regulation of built development lies with the local authorities, and it would be a major task to remap local authorities to match river catchments. Local authorities have a large range of territorial responsibilities, apart from town and country planning, many of which do not logically conform with river catchments. It would seem disproportionate to mess up the relationship between these other functions in order to provide a better fit with river catchment management. Where particular problems are known to arise, collaboration can be established. In Scotland, SEPA took over the catchment based River Purification Authorities, which had a strong local authority component anyway, and those relationships will persist while new ones are established. Moreover, in the town and country planning function, local authorities are used to cross-boundary working (though some will argue that the demise of the regions in 1996 has been at the cost of effective strategic planning). Improvement in catchment planning in Scotland would probably be secured more effectively by revisiting SEPA's founding legislation to give it comprehensive catchment management duties, such as are bestowed on the EA, rather than by remapping boundaries to fit river catchments.

Similar arguments apply to the coast. ICZM (integrated coastal zone management) was an expression prominent in the planning press during the early and mid 1990s, though it was never clear exactly what it stood for. The UK government passed up the opportunity in 1993 of reorganising the institutional framework of the coast to fit coastal sediment cells, in favour of strengthening the existing sectoral structure where specifically needed, and encouraging collaboration across boundaries to address cross-boundary issues. Sediment cells do not necessarily provide the best management structure even for essentially natural processes, in particular in estuaries. Again, these can be addressed by collaborative working without necessarily invoking a new institutional structure or redrawing boundaries. In Scotland, the firths fora are beginning to bring together the full range of interested parties to collect and share information on estuarine management and draw up management plans. One specific improvement which might be considered in Scotland is to allocate explicit policy responsibility and a budget to SEPA for coastal defence, enabling better coordination between river and sea flood defence.

Turning to the management of land, the decision finally to go ahead with establishing national parks in Scotland would appear on the face of it to be a recognition that administrative structures do in some cases need to be set up which better match natural structures. However, what is being managed here is less the natural resource itself than human use of it; and the only statutory function which is redrawn is the town and country planning one, with relatively little disruption of the wider structures of governance. The half century's experience of national parks in England and Wales indicates that what has contributed to their effectiveness is in any case less the remapping of the town and country planning function, than the creation of a national park office overlying existing structures, which has an oversight of the whole park and a budget for positive actions.

At a general level, we are nervous about any notion of systematically remapping governance functions to fit what are perceived to be the boundaries of natural systems. First, adopting ecological determinism as a basis for mapping governance structures appears to us to ignore the reality that in a country like the UK social, economic and political forces very largely buffer human-land/water relationships: this is not a virgin land frontier. Second, human views of nature are socially produced, and ecological theory is no more "objective" a view than is that of the farmer against that of the urban dweller who views the countryside as a leisure asset, or than that of the tenant as compared with that of the landlord. Classifying the country into natural areas or natural heritage zones is only a human interpretation of natural dynamics, by a particular interest group with a particular viewpoint.

Question 2c.   This question raises the ultimate conflict in town and country planning: that by law it is restricted to regulating the spatial arrangement of development, yet to promote sustainable development of society requires far more than that. Development Plans have always struggled with this conflict, and sought to burst out of their spatial straitjackets to tackle wider social planning.

In reality the question is nugatory: the town and country planning regime must be partly responsible for delivering the targets of other policy regimes, to the extent that it manages their locational expression. It is also an apt instrument for doing so: it possesses an explicit spatial and institutional hierarchy from the local to the national, with inbuilt referral procedures, and which has been tested over half a century. It is founded on the principle of subsidiarity, which chimes well with the ethic of sustainable development. And there is a clear and relatively rapid line of political accountability at the level at which most of it takes place, local government.

However, there is sometimes a need better to recognise that the town and country planning regime is in fact seeking to implement the targets of other policy regimes. Because it is so often the arena in which the tensions between policy conflicts have to be resolved, it tends to be the butt of the discontent of disappointed parties. It is too easy for government departments to leave it to the town and country planning system to reconcile policy conflicts, rather than trying to sort them at root. The Cairngorm funicular case referred to under above Question 1b is a case in point.

Question 2e.   If "lack of control" refers to the sum of environmental planning regimes in the wide sense, then we would argue that there is no particular lack, except that cross-compliance for agricultural price support would be a more effective way than the current arrangements of securing environmental safeguards without pulling the plug on support for farming.

However, for the purposes of this answer we assume the question refers to lack of control by the town and country planning regime in particular. We do not favour extension of the planning regime into the realms of farming, forestry and estate management beyond their present extent. The proposition to extend planning controls over farming and forestry received particular attention from the mid 70s to late 80s. It has had a low profile since, despite attempts to revive it. It was put forward as an interventionist solution to problems in those industries, which have since been addressed by more appropriate reforms of their existing support and regulatory regimes: scaling back of farm grants for drainage, hedge grubbing, moor gripping etc., the rolling back of intervention buying, and the removal of forestry tax breaks in 1988, etc. There has been an extension of the town and country planning regime in the requirement to notify farming and forestry buildings to planning authorities, but that involved no change to the definition of development. The only extensions into land management as such have been the hedgerow regulations, which are extremely complex to operate and have yet to prove their worth, and the indicative forestry strategies referred to above under Question 1h.

The latter have been strongly criticised by some landscape architects and ecologists on the grounds that their approach of zoning land into preferred, potential and sensitive (i.e. with presumption against) is too crude to be of much use either to the industry or for protecting other interests. There is a case for adopting an approach based instead on a mix of policies and design responses to different landscape conditions. In any case, the strategies create an anomaly, in that they appear in statutory Structure Plans prepared by planning authorities, yet the statutory agency for forestry is the Forestry Authority. A compromise solution would be to retain the zoning component of the strategies, while treating the zoning as strictly indicative, and to complement it more strongly with policies and design guidelines. The existing Forestry Commission guidelines on a range of environmental and design matters would give planning authorities a head start.

Question 3g.   In the sphere of emissions and effluent abatement, pollution taxes and quota trading markets clearly offer the potential to achieve desired environmental targets for lower social cost, by allowing industry flexibility in how it meets the targets. These are tools which the UK is only beginning to exploit, as for example in trading flue gas emissions between plant within the major electricity generating companies. We would like to see these tools more widely applied where profitable, particularly as they provide means of raising serious money which can be ploughed back into R&D in pollution abatement, schemes to support industry in abatement and so forth. We do not see particular concerns of openness, accountability or transparency in the use of economic instruments. We would in any case point to the secrecy of negotiations between polluters and inspectors which dominated the traditional command-and-control regulation of pollution until recent legislation on access to licence information, and which, combined with the paucity of prosecutions, led to a widespread view that the pollution control inspectors were "too close to industry".

There has been a debate about extending the application of economic instruments to related activities more closely tied to the land: waste management, the winning of minerals and the development of green field sites. The landfill tax is the only application to have gone ahead in the UK. This has successfully raised a great deal of tax revenue, but it has highlighted the difficulty of making a blunt economic instrument in practice serve the purpose for which it is ostensibly intended. Much of the money paid by the waste industry as tax rebate into the so-called environmental bodies, while used for all manner of local environmental good works, is unsurprisingly not used to help shift waste management higher up the waste hierarchy, since this would not benefit the landfill industry. Moreover, there are well aired unwanted side effects of the tax, such as increased fly tipping, and inert waste being diverted to otherwise functionless landscaping in order to avoid paying the tax. This last has resulted in shortages of inert waste, leading landfill operators counterproductively to buy in virgin aggregate to landscape and cap their sites. Moreover, the tax has been criticised because it is raised by central government, and not hypothecated such that the public can see that the extra which they end up paying for waste disposal is being used to address waste management.

The problems of operating the landfill tax suggest that minerals or green field taxes, while they may successfully raise revenue, may be difficult to tune to achieve their environmental purposes and to avoid unwanted side effects. It may be that in land-related activities, other instruments, including town and country planning, remain more effective.

Question 3h.   Previous attempts to introduce a betterment tax have failed politically. To an extent its function has been replaced by the use of obligations (England and Wales) and agreements (Scotland) to secure community benefits from developers. The latter approach has the merit of permitting local authorities to seek what they deem most appropriate to the local community, but is open to abuse, and arguably is not fairly applied. There is a feeling among speculative housebuilders that in effect they are being charged a tax which not all types of developer, such as those bringing jobs into an area, have to pay, and that the charge varies without rhyme or reason between planning authorities. Impact fee charging by local planning authorities would be a more transparent and accountable alternative providing the same flexibility and an equal or higher level of local benefits.

Another specific betterment recovery tool is the suggested green field tax, though by definition it would be restricted to previously undeveloped sites. It has the merit that it would coincidentally help to meet the government's 60% brown field national target for new housing development, itself driven both by the traditional agenda of countryside protection and by the newer agendas of urban regeneration and travel demand management. The tax would operate through dampening demand for green field sites by bringing their costs closer to those of brownfield sites, which often carry costs of cleaning up dereliction or even contamination. However, the lessons of the landfill tax suggest that designing it well would not be easy, and locally levied impact fees seem more attractive.

Question 4b.   The town and country planning regime is uniquely open, transparent and accountable among environmental planning regimes. The vast majority of decisions are taken locally, applications are advertised and can be consulted with little effort, and all but the most routine decisions are taken by locally elected politicians in committees open to the public, who can be voted out of office in the next round of local elections. Notwithstanding criticism that in practice the ordinary public is little able to avail itself of the opportunity to participate in planning decisions, local decisions by other environmental regulation regimes are by comparison virtually closed to the public. They are taken by salaried officers behind closed doors, following policy laid down at national level by agencies which are often run by appointed boards, and which are only very distantly accountable through parliamentary procedures far removed from the local case and community. The removal of environmental protection powers from local authorities in recent years has only exacerbated this democratic deficit, whatever gains it may (or may not) bring in professional competence and resourcing. The only concession to subsidiarity is the devolution of subnational decisions to appointed regional boards (but not locally appointed), as in SEPA [CHECK], SNH and the Forestry Commission.

For example, within the Forestry Commission disputed cases are referred to Regional Advisory Committees, whose membership has over the years been made more representative of non-forestry interests. However, only 0.3% of forestry grant or felling applications go to the Committees, and they are not open to the public. Information on individual applications is also not open to the public [CHECK].

There is thus clearly room for much more local access to information and participation in most regimes of environmental regulation, to achieve greater openness and transparency. Nevertheless, they will never be much more accountable than now unless decisions are devolved to locally elected bodies, however that is arranged institutionally.

Question 4c.   We have argued in the last answer that the town and country planning system displays relatively good subsidiarity and democracy credentials, and earlier that it also has an explicitly worked out procedure for referral from local to national levels. Nevertheless, it has been argued that the proliferation of national planning guidance in the 1990s represents a considerable increase of intervention by central government into local planning authority decision making. The growth of national guidance has the merit that it should make more consistent central government decisions on matters that are referred to national level, and also make decisions at local level more predictable for all parties, since it is a material consideration which can be wielded at appeals. The price paid is the extension of the central government view into manifold issues which are really only of local importance.

This is seen most clearly in Scotland. Here in 1981 the first consolidated National Planning Guidelines were published. These were just a few pages in all, focused strictly on matters which could be decided only at national level, and were locationally-oriented. In contrast, the National Planning Policy Guidelines of the 1990s have emulated their PPG counterparts south of the Border, in putting out a central view on matters which arise all over the nation. The term "national" has shifted significantly in meaning. The Scottish Executive is considering making the formulation of national guidance more open and participative, but the product will still remain a one size fits all at the end of the process.

It could certainly be argued that the UK planning profession has meekly accepted a loss of subsidiarity as the price to be paid for spatial consistency in policy across the nation. Arguments in favour of consistency are that offering an even playing field across the nation to the developer secures fair competition, and that it offers protects against short-termist local authorities selling their environmental assets cheap to attract investment. Yet the profession has not opened up much of a debate on these precepts, or on the risk that blanket policies pose to another currently favoured planner's credo, the celebration of local identity. Perhaps Scottish and Welsh devolution will in time be a spur to such a debate.

Question 5a.   EIAs of individual development applications typically use a fairly tightly drawn project bubble. One can adduce a number of reasons for this, including cost control, perceptions of applicant and regulator about the extent of their responsibilities, and increasing uncertainty the wider the bubble is drawn. On the other hand, in development control local planning authorities now often pick up some of the wider environmental issues through other tools, e.g. the emissions implications of associated travel via a traffic impact assessment.

Strategic environmental appraisals (SEA) - of policies, Development Plans, regional planning guidance, EU spending programmes and the like - tend by their nature to cast their net more widely. On the other hand, they seldom involve such detailed research, relying more on the judgement of experienced staff and consultations to pick up effects that might otherwise have been missed. This is inevitable because of the wider scope of what is being appraised, and the greater uncertainty in projecting likely effects the higher up the decision making chain one goes. Besides, unlike EIA, SEA is often not a statutory procedure in which one party (an applicant) is seeking to convince another (a regulator) of their case, on which money is very explicitly riding.

The recent extension of SEA into broader strategic sustainability appraisal should help to ensure that environmental effects are not considered in isolation, but this remains a very new art. It is noteworthy that, at project level, Britain does not require the social impact assessments which have been for some time common in America, and which arguably go some way toward a more rounded sustainability appraisal of applications to develop.

Question 5b.   There is no reason in principle why increased use of environmental appraisals should not dovetail with the operation of environment planning systems. In the Netherlands, for example, several national agencies systematically apply it to their spending programmes. The project EIA regulations have been absorbed into the UK town and country planning regime and other regulatory regimes in Britain with little trauma, despite the initial reluctance of the UK government to countenance what it saw as an unnecessary extra layer of bureaucracy. Likewise, SEA is spreading through plan making with relatively little fuss, despite the agonies of reaching an agreement on an SEA directive at EU level. It imposes a much smaller extra burden than, for example, the introduction of environmental management systems (EMS), which have not been taken up with enthusiasm by local authorities, and probably yield less tangible benefits.

The UK has been criticised for the lack of any national body to control the quality of environmental appraisals, such as exist in some other nations (again, the Netherlands provide a good model). The self-constituted Institute of Environmental Assessment offers a service vetting the quality of individual project EIS, but it is only a paper exercise not involving a site visit, and the institute does not fulfil the broader role of an independent and authoritative body with oversight of quality at the national level. An independent national body would be desirable, with the remit of keeping under review the overall quality of appraisals, identifying and disseminating best practice - or at least advising government of it, and perhaps auditing the most significant appraisals, such as all Schedule 1 EIS.

The UK system of EIA, in which the applicant hires the consultant who does it, has also been criticised as open to abuse, because the consultant is under pressure to conform with the wishes of their employer, who usually views the EIS as simply a bureaucratic step in the process of obtaining development permission. In California, the EIA is commissioned by the regulator and the applicant is recharged. In that system, however, the scoping exercise, in which regulator and applicant agree what the EIS will cover, results in a legally binding agreement. That would have to be a corollary of the regulator commissioning the EIA, in order to avoid abuse by the regulator. In the UK, the recently revised EIA regulations require the regulator to undertake scoping if the applicant asks for it, but the result is not a legally binding agreement.

The most effective check against biased EIS under the UK system is the expertise of the regulator's staff who vet the submitted EIS. This is however still often rather low, because only 300 or so EIS are submitted annually, and they are not evenly spread around the country; and because most planners lack much formal education in the processes of the natural environment or their measurement and prediction. Many local planning authorities therefore hire their own consultants to evaluate submitted EIS. This should create an effective check on quality, but raises the total cost. One advantage of the UK system, in which the applicant commissions the EIA consultant, is that it does clearly separate the actor undertaking the EIA from the actor judging its quality (the regulator).

In sum, it is not clear that commissioning of EIS by regulators would necessarily bring improvements in the UK. What may be more important is the degree of influence of the EIS over the decision to grant or refuse permission, and the conditions attached to permission. Research shows that the EIS may have a large or a small influence, depending on a variety of factors. These include previous experience of the regulator with the applicant, and the view which the regulator takes of the proposed development irrespective of the quality or conclusions of the EIS (for example, a local planning authority will not welcome an opencast mine in a locality flagged for high tech investment bringing many more jobs and sensitive to bad image neighbours).

Question 5c.  We have commented briefly on the difficulty of identifying critical environmental capital under Question 1b. We wish here to put forward for consideration a specific method for appraising what measures should be taken in response to damage to environmental capital at large resulting from development. This is a universal obligation for environmental compensation of green field development, operated in Germany for some years, and enshrined in German federal planning law in 1998. The great appeal of this instrument is that it targets humble everyday developments, which would not incur an EIA, but which cumulatively erode environmental goods and services - probably far more than those relatively few developments which do incur EIA. The principle is that every loss should be compensated as nearly as practicable in kind and close to the site of development. The paradigm is ecological.

Research in this School has investigated the principles and operation of the system in Germany, and the potential for something similar in the UK. The general concept of environmental compensation certainly exists in the UK town and country planning regime, but it is required only in a few specific circumstances - loss of trees and damage to Natura 2000 sites designated under the EC Habitats Directive. The general planning tools of conditions and planning agreements provide very flexible means of securing compensation more widely, but neither carries any associated protocols founded in an ecological paradigm. Indeed, UK planners tend to view the physical environment more in terms of that ill defined concept, amenity.

There are major concerns with the operation of the German obligation in practice. Local authorities often try to wriggle out of securing implementation, the valuation of environmental assets is not standardised, and some of the methods used to value assets and compute compensation run totally counter to the essence of an ecosystems approach. Moreover, the entire approach fosters a view that all assets have their price and can therefore be sold off in return for compensation. The Germans have insured against this by legally embedding the obligation firmly in a hierarchy of avoidance-mitigation-compensation, in which compensation is the last resort where avoidance or mitigation have failed.

On balance, we believe that the UK town and country planning profession would do well to investigate the potential for introducing a similar approach here. It would chime well with the insistence of the natural heritage agencies in recent years that we must look beyond protected sites to the wider countryside. It would, like the EIA regulations, foster among planners and developers alike greater ecological awareness, and a stronger sense of responsibility for the health of ecological assets. And it has the merit of being targeted in a way that a blanket green field tax could never be.

Question 5e.   We have alluded in the answer to Question 5b to the competence of local planning authorities to evaluate EIS. As indicated in the answer to Question 5c, the ecological training of town and country planners is generally thin. Research by this School in 1997 showed that, while all courses accredited by the Royal Town Planning Institute must cover a certain amount of basic education about natural environment systems, far fewer offered specialisms in environmental protection, only one in minerals planning, and none in waste planning. Planners' expertise in these areas is by and large picked up on the job, and to an extent through CPD. Some large authorities can afford to hire specialists who are not planners.

We would argue that there is a general need to boost understanding of the natural environment within planning education. The problem is that planners are always being asked to encompass new fields, without ever dropping existing ones. Quite apart from the intellectual demand this makes on them, it becomes difficult to find room in the curriculum of town and country planning courses for everything and to establish a balance between social, economic, environmental, design etc. perspectives. Ironically, the imperative of university research performance may work against achieving a good balance of competence in town and country planning schools, because schools are under pressure to demonstrate research strengths in well defined areas. The larger the functioning unit - school or faculty - to which the town and country planning courses belong, the less this is likely to be a constraint. This is an argument, alongside financial efficiency, for large human environment faculties, all the more persuasive in these days of the mantras of sustainable development and joined-up government.

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