138: 237 local authorities for 36 nationally significant infrastructure projects

This is entry number 138, first published on 8 June 2010, of a blog on the implementation of the Planning Act 2008. Click here for a link to the whole blog. If you would like to be notified when the blog is updated, with links sent by email, click here.

Today's entry provides graphic evidence of the extent of local authority involvement in the Planning Act regime.

The Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) will survive for at least another year and during that time will examine a number of applications for nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs).  The new regime for authorising NSIPs under the Planning Act, which is likely to survive the replacement of the IPC, places a number of responsibilities on local authorities.

Most of the responsibilities not only apply to the local authorities where the projects are to be located, but also their neighbours.  This dramatically increases the number of local authorities that can have a say.

The IPC website contains a map of the 36 projects it has been told about so far, which can be found here.  When the local authorities that will host these projects are identified, the map looks like this:

Those authorities will have responsibility for commenting on the Statement of Community Consultation and the policing of the implementation of NSIP authorisations.  As some of the 36 projects span more than one authority and some are in a two-tier area (county and district), but some are offshore, the total number of 'host' authorities is 54.  In the map below, the host authorities are coloured green.

That in itself begs an interesting question, one that I was asked at a Planning Officers Society conference a couple of weeks ago: there are eight offshore projects proposed - who will police their implementation when there is no 'host' local authority?  The answer appears to be no-one at the moment.

54 authorities is already a considerable number, but if one includes all those authorities' neighbours, which are also given responsibilities under the Act, this increases more than fivefold to 237.  In the map below, these 'wider' authorities are coloured blue.  More than half the authorities in England are involved, as are almost all Welsh authorities.

These authorities are pre-application consultees, EIA scoping opinion consultees and, potentially, authors of 'adequacy of consultation reports', requirers of hearings into applications and authors of 'local impact reports'.  Ironically, government guidance only mentions commenting on the SoCC as a responsibility of the wider authorities, which (a) is not one of their responsibilities and (b) leaves out all their actual responsibilities (see page 19 here).

If you would like to know if a particular local authority is affected by any NSIPs (and which one(s)), please ask.

Previous entry 137: news on nuclear and coal-fired power
Next entry: 138: how cuts will affect major infrastructure projects