Sustainability appraisal

A quick guide to sustainability appraisal and strategic environmental assessment

What is sustainability appraisal?

The new planning system, introduced in 2004, aims to ensure that all new development is as sustainable as possible. Sustainable development is development that aims to meet social, economic and environmental needs in the present and for future generations. A new process called sustainability appraisal, has been introduced to check plans.

What is strategic environmental assessment?

A European directive, commonly known as the Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive (SEA), became UK law in 2004. It requires plans and programmes to be assessed for their potential environmental effects at an early/strategic stage of planning. It differs from the process of environmental impact assessment, or EIA as it is usually known, which considers environmental impacts of individual developments, not plans and programmes as a whole.

How are the two linked?

By law, both processes must be carried out on all planning policy documents produced in England and Wales. There is overlap between the processes, the main differences being the wider scope of the sustainability appraisal process considering not only environmental effects of plans but also social and economic. The government have produced guidance (available from the DCLG website on the right of the page) that combines the two processes together and called it sustainability appraisal or SA for short. The process looks at all three areas of sustainable development; social, environmental and economic, but it ensures that the strict requirements of the strategic environmental assessment directive are still met.

How do sustainability appraisals work?

For each planning policy document being prepared by the district council, forming part of the local development framework, the sustainability appraisal process will be taking place at the same time.

Step 1 - The first step is to produce a scoping report. This will look at the social, economic and environmental background to the district (or more specific areas depending on the nature of the document e.g. Poundbury). The early involvement of interested parties at this stage is important. This information will be used along with current guidance and responses from consultees, to develop the sustainability appraisal framework, which is essentially a sustainability checklist of what we hope to achieve through the development.

Step 2 - When work begins on the preparation of the planning document this checklist can be used to test the emerging options, which might range from where new housing is allocated to the amount of on-site renewable energy the council will expect new developments to generate. Generally there will be a number of different options (including an option to do nothing) that can be tested against each other and will mean that we can then compare them in terms of their contribution to sustainable development.

Step 3 - As the planning document progresses, preferred options will be developed. The comparison process in step 2 will help the decision-making. The checklist and the background information can then be used to predict the possible effects of the policy. Where there are negative effects predicted, at this early stage the council can consider alternatives or suggest suitable mitigation measures to reduce the impact.

Step 4: The output of this process will be a sustainability appraisal report, which will set out how each potential option performed against the checklist and the predicted effects of the preferred options. This will go out on consultation alongside the planning document that it has assessed. This means that the public can look at each policy or option in the planning document and compare how it performed in terms of sustainability. A summary will also be produced for those who want a brief overview without getting into the detailed technical information in the report.

What is happening at West Dorset?

We have now completed sustainability appraisals for both the Poundbury and Barton Farm Development Briefs. The final reports can be read by clicking on the links on the right of this page.

An initial assessment of the issues and options for the Core Strategy has also been carried out. A short report on this can be read by clicking on the link on the right of this page.