Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

1.      The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) welcomes the opportunity to submit evidence to this study.

2.      The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is the UK's leading organisation for basic, strategic and applied research and training across the spectrum of the environmental sciences. NERC's purpose is to support high quality scientific research, survey, monitoring and postgraduate training with the objective of enhancing knowledge, understanding and prediction of the environment and its resources. NERC achieves this through its support of scientists at universities and through its own Centres and Surveys: the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the British Geological Survey (BGS), the Centre for Coastal and Marine Sciences (CCMS), the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and the Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC - a joint venture with the University of Southampton).

3.      NERC has a UK-wide remit, and NERC's interest encompasses the issues surrounding environmental planning in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

4.      This evidence largely draws on inputs from BGS and CEH.

General Comments
5.      The Commission has identified five major areas of interest:

1. the need for environmental planning to play its role in helping achieve the goal of sustainability;
   
2. the challenges presented by the lack of coincidence between administrative and environmental boundaries;
   
3. whether more integration or more co-ordination is required to lessen the emerging tensions between the various approaches to environmental planning;
   
4. identification of the most appropriate administrative level and geographic scale at which forward planning, decision making and monitoring should be done to ensure the necessary degree of subsidiarity and democratic accountability in environmental planning;

5. the role environmental assessment procedures might play in improving planning procedures and processes.

7.      It would be helpful if the term "environmental planning" could be defined since the UK does not have an environmental planning system. There are separate (but inevitably overlapping) systems for environmental protection, pollution control, and land-use planning, which together make up environmental planning. The administrative reality is rather complex. There is more than one regulatory regime within each of these three systems, overseen by a number of government bodies. One government body can be responsible for a number of regulatory regimes. More than one government body can have legitimate responsibilities for a single regulatory regime.

Comments on the Key Themes

Environmental Sustainability
8.      Current delivery of sustainability is modest and due to an increasing recognition, across all regulatory regimes, of the need to respect the services the environment delivers. The Commission could usefully consider common themes in the aims and objectives of existing and emerging UK and European legislation leading to decision- making with more sustainable outcomes.

9.      If such common themes can be identified, a framework for sustainable environmental planning could be constructed. This might reduce tensions that can exist between the grant of planning permission and award of a licence under Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control. There are precedents for identifying such framing ideas in the course of the Commission's studies. For example, the Best Practical Environmental Option (BPEO) concept was/is an idea or approach to environmental planning that incorporates both environmental and economic factors. Other key themes at the heart of environmental planning are (a) the need to plan to prevent or minimise harm to the health of living organisms (this includes people) and the ecosystems on which they depend, and (b) the need to develop the notion of "natural capital" in a way that will make it possible to judge the importance that should be assigned in the planning process to the services the environment delivers (eg natural resource provision, flood defence, leisure and amenity, biodiversity, habitat quality).

10.      Of central importance is the need for all regulatory regimes and their user groups to have better access to environmental information so that they understand the potential impact of development or change. This is essential to enable tolerable rates of change to be predicted and incorporated into an effective environmental planning process.

11.      An effective environmental planning framework should incorporate environmental characterisation, assessment of generic hazards, evaluation of site-specific risks and subsequent monitoring and review procedures. Depending on the temporal and spatial scale at which an environmental planning regime were to operate, good use could be made of broad indicators of environmental health provided that the relationship of the indicator to a particular force for change were adequately understood. Both DETR and MAFF have recently produced lists of indicators.

12.      To make an environmental planning system work it will be necessary to identify a base set of environmental information that all developers need to gather and for developers to know what criteria and thresholds need to be met to ensure the environment is protected. CEH has recently completed relevant work for DETR in relation to the Control of Major Accident Hazard (COMAH). This work is published as: Comparative Environment Index (DETR, Stationery Office, February 1999); Guidance on Interpretation of Major Accident to the Environment for the Purposes of the COMAH Regulations (DETR, Stationery Office, June 1999). Taken together these two documents represent an attempt to provide part of the environmental framework in which risk assessment decisions can be made about major industrial installations.

13.      A number of further technical and scientific advances need to be made to improve the effectiveness of environmental planning. These include:

• Improved methods and administrative systems for the monitoring and review of the outcomes from decision-making. Without progress in this area it will remain difficult to learn either from past and current mistakes or best practice.
  
• Clearer definition of the key features of habitats and ecosystems (especially legally protected ones) that are essential to the legal designation or service delivery, and a better appreciation of what constitutes harm to a individual, species, habitat or ecosystem.
  
• More work on the "natural capital" concept and how services delivered by species, and ecological communities and systems etc can be valued against economic or social benefits (this may involve further studies of the intensity, scale and pattern of all land use categories).
  
• Much improved hazard and risk assessment procedures based on real world knowledge and expertise. At present some assessment procedures place too much reliance on standardised procedures using default safety factors that can dominate outcomes from environmental risk assessments.

15.      Effective regulatory approaches are those which stop, control or mediate pollution and those that encourage clean up of waters (surface, groundwater and marine), soils, rocks and air. An example is the contaminated land regime from Part IIa of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 which can be used to back up planning regulations. Implementation of the Groundwater Directive will necessitate holistic thinking across existing barriers between important environmental planning themes.

16.      Land use planning can sometimes be biased against development, for example the mineral industry. Relative impacts and restoration potential need to be considered in the context of ongoing demand. New ideas and technology can reduce waste materials significantly and restore old mineral working sites to a point where they become environmental assets with high levels of biodiversity.

17.      Environmental planning may be hindered by a lack of broadly experienced personnel who can think holistically to examine overall problems and think across legislative packages and scientific boundaries. Important planning issues may fall between expert groupings.

18.      Consequences of planning decisions may take a considerable time to impact. Examples include groundwater pollution taking many decades before it flows underground to reach surface water or springs, and the podsolisation of soils under coniferous forests.

Boundaries
19.      The formation of a large number of relatively small unitary authorities has created difficulties in the past because they tend to take a parochial view. Planning must be based on logical, scientifically based process, scale regions such as river catchments, aquifer recharge areas and major areas of land use, so that a more strategic overview can be established. This would also allow the cumulative impact of separate environmental plans within a region to be more easily assessed. This is important if land use planning is to be expanded and used as a tool to protect and manage all future landscapes, seascapes and sustainable resources on the basis that parts of the environment do interact strongly and cannot be planned for separately.

20.      Currently, we do not have the knowledge to make adequate decisions for complex interactive physical processes which impact on the environment, and are unable therefore to assess the implications from long term risks for these systems. Hence, there is a need to archive information and decisions so that they can be reviewed when our understanding of physical processes and interactions improves. More interactive means of access to environmental information at an appropriate scale suitable for the planning system are needed through better use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the internet.

21.      GIS have an enormous role to play in contributing to environmental planning, which requires the integration of a wide range of land use and related information. GIS are now the primary means of managing and presenting large spatial data sets to assist in the dissemination of ideas and concepts in the planning process, and to enable people to understand what is happening in the environment. GIS can also aid making difficult but balanced judgements on the development of land which needs access to reliable and up-to-date information on competing objectives. Other tools could include virtual and 3D presentation packages.

22.      To underpin these tools, the basic information needs to be held in suitable database formats. Vast amounts of information relevant to planning are held by various organisations in the UK. Environmental data are a valuable national resource, and NERC has set up seven Data Centres to safeguard and manage these data. BGS holds geological, geochemical, land surface, seabed, hazard location and historical change data in analogue and digital form. The aim is to make all this information easily accessible in a digital form. The planning system would benefit from knowing what data are available, from where, and in what format. Important data could then be translated (taking account of quality issues) into digital format which could be easily accessed, reviewed and updated. This is an expert task.

23.      The main problems at present appear to revolve around data ownership/licensing and compatibility between various GIS packages. These problems can best be addressed through closer co-operation between all agencies who are stakeholders in the planning and environmental protection process. This would lead to increased awareness of data sets held by other agencies, wider and more flexible data sharing agreements and partnerships, and the adoption of common GIS platforms. The full extent of public data sets could then be brought to bear on issues of planning and environmental protection.

24.      Modeling packages are also needed which are based on processes and allow the datasets to be modeled to make predictions and display the consequences of decisions made. Some models exist presently, but the development of appropriate simulation models of environmental impacts of various types of economic and social developments is needed to overcome problems caused by a lack of coincidence of administrative and environmental boundaries.

25.      Land use planning, as presently defined, is restricted in its approach to viewing the environment as a whole and assessing how man will impact on it. Quality of life and the environment would benefit from a holistic approach where the complex interactions could be studied. For example, coal and gas licensing regulations are often in conflict. Many oil and gas fields will be decommissioned and infrastructure removed because licensing is under hydrocarbon production legislation. Depleted oil and gas fields could be used beyond their production license life for other purposes such as CO₂ disposal.

Integration or co-ordination?
26.      With the present structures and responsibilities, designing a more integrated and effective system of environmental planning presents a major challenge. Better co-ordination of the activities of agencies within a national framework for environmental planning could lead to more integrated decision-making.

27.      Planning decisions in the UK should not be considered in isolation where there may be impacts outside the UK. For example, decisions that stop mining and waste disposal activities on local environmental grounds may simply transfer the activities to other countries where the environmental and human impact may be greater.

28.      The wish to speed up the land use planning process can be reconciled with effective environmental protection if all information is brought together and full consultation given. Decisions on land use planning and pollution control should be integrated not parallel. Satisfactory integration of transport planing and land use planning has not been achieved. More capital investment is needed to ensure this is improved.

29.      Economic instruments and other methods could complement environmental planning regulation. For example, tax incentives, effective education and public relations penalties could be introduced.

30.      There are already ways of linking taxation to environmental impact. The Government has recently introduced an aggregates tax which is intended to channel 'development' funds back into the area most affected by aggregate development. This is an example of public ownership of development gain. We have yet to see the impact of this new legislation.

31.      A consideration of environmental management and impacts, as they largely affect the land area of the UK, would be incomplete without considering the coastal and marine environment, both in terms of its ability to accept and be damaged by environmental pressures. Management and monitoring responsibilities in coastal zones and in estuaries need to be defined where there are no clear lines of authority.

Assessment approaches
32.      Table 1 is a copy of an input provided by CEH to the DTI Foresight exercise on environmental appraisal. The table summarizes approaches to environmental assessment and gives examples of the information required to carry out the procedures.

33.      As the requirement for Environmental Impact Assessment Statements grows, it becomes imperative that interested individuals and bodies are aware of all relevant databases and sources of environmental information and expertise. The continued development and use of GIS should be promoted as a valuable tool in this process.

Planning and Communications Directorate Natural Environment Research Council
June 2000

Table 1     ENVIRONMENTAL APPRAISAL: INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS FOR ASSESSING SUSTAINABILITY

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