ABSTRACT
It is assumed that by now the local planning authority, or the Secretary of State, or the developer as the case may be, has requested an Environmental Assessment and that the need for it has been definitely agreed. The developer will have been notified of the subjects which the authority consider to require assessment, and some agreement as to the necessary level of investigation (not ‘scoping’!) will have been reached. It is also assumed that the negotiation and appeal stages have been passed, and that the developer is now committed to carrying out an Environmental Assessment of his project. There are usually considered to be four main stages in the preparation of an Environmental Assessment and Environmental Statement; these can be subdivided into many other sub-stages but, whatever breakdown of the workload is adopted, it is essential to complete each stage before moving on to the next. Not only does this make the project manager’s life less hectic, but, because in the nature of environmental analysis every factor interacts with nearly every other factor, it is unwise to leave any section of analysis to be completed later in case it overturns the previous conclusions. The presentation of the data may well be held over until the final stages, but the basic material of the assessment must be established as completely as possible at each stage. The Regulations require copies of various documents to be sent to all and sundry (‘sundry’ always gets forgotten) at each stage, and the project manager will go crazy if he has to send out amended documents to every one of the original recipients; it is therefore vital to check that each document is quite complete before being sent out.
