Planning & EIA

We have coordinated fourteen environmental statements since 2019, and the programme risk is almost never the technical work. It is the sequence: the transport chapter cannot finish without the trip generation, which waits on the layout; the air quality chapter needs the transport figures; the landscape chapter needs the final building heights. One late input moves three chapters and the submission date.

So we run an ES on a critical path with the dependencies written down and a named owner per chapter, and we hold a fortnightly call that everyone dislikes and nobody has yet asked to cancel. On the two schemes where we inherited a stalled ES, both had every chapter individually competent and no dependency map.

On screening and scoping, our advice is often that a scheme does not need an EIA at all. A screening opinion request costs a few thousand pounds and three weeks; a voluntary environmental statement on a development that never needed one costs six figures and eight months. We have obtained negative screening determinations on nine schemes since 2022, and we would rather do that than sell you the bigger job.